YBook

yBook is available from Spacejock.com. yRead and BookDB is also available from the site.

yBook features

yBook is an eBook reader with several nice features.

• Runs on any Windows PC (Win95 or later)
• Display your book on side-by-side or single pages.
• Resize the pages, adjust the margins, set text and paper colour.
• Text, HTML, RTF, and PalmDOC reader
• Newest version can also read ePUB.
• Search for words or phrases
• Automatic bookmarks
• Text sizes from tiny to HUGE
• No zooming, panning or scrolling
• Direct download of all Gutenberg titles, with index.
• Internationalized menus - Spanish, German, etc
• Completely free to use: No registration, no adware, no spyware.
• Can print books

yBook2

This version is being developed using new code to match yWriter 5. It will run on WinXP or later, Mono 2.4 or later. Mono permits running on Linux and MacOS X.

yRead features

yRead is a TTS capable reader for Windows. Use it to listen to ebooks, your own writing or any other piece of text

• yRead will load a plain text (TXT) or HTML file.
• single-column, resizable window.
• Read the file out loud, using human speech.
• Voices available for other languages
• Direct download of all Gutenberg titles, with index
• Simple translation table

By default, yRead uses the Microsoft SAPI 5.1 speech engine with a couple of voices which sound like constipated robots. The good news is that if you purchase and install one or more AT&T Natural Voices or Neospeech voices, they'll be available in the yRead dropdown menu.

yRead includes a translation table. This enables you to build a series of phonetic spellings so that mis-pronounced words will come out correctly. This is a fairly dumb string replace, so if you replace 'e' with 'x' you'll havx to livx with thx consxquxncxs.

BookDB

BookDB can store data on all your books with author, category, publisher etc and print them out in a variety of formats. BookDB has a super-condensed print mode so you can take a list with you when you visit a book store.

BookDB also has lending library features. With them, you can add borrowers, loan out books, add multiple copies and so on.

You can also import your catalog from LibraryThing, which gives you a local, searchable database of your books. Whilst logged in to your LT account, click Tools and then "Export all records as tab-delimited text". Save the XLS file to your computer and then use BookDB's 'Import LibraryThing' to read all the data in.

Barcodes: You can use any barcode scanner with BookDB provided it sends the data as keypresses.

BookDB supports many languages including Brasil (Brazilian Portuguese), Catalá (Catalan), Dansk (Danish), Deutsch (German), Español (Spanish), Finnish (Suomi), Français (French), Galego (Galician), Italiano (Italian), Lietuviø (Lithuanian), Nederlands (Dutch), Polski (Polish), Português (Portuguese), Slovensko (Slovenian), Slovenèina (Slovak), ViÖt Nam (Vietnamese), hrvatski (Croatian), ÁcÅ餤¤å (Chinese Traditional), ÅëëçíéêÜ (Greek), Èeština (Czech), Ðóññêèé (Russian), Óêðà¿íñüêà (ukrainian), and ÝÇÑÓí (Persian)

yWriter

A word processor to help you to author your own Novels. The programmer uses this to write his own SF novels. yWriter5 is a dotnet 2.0 app for Windows, but will also run on GNU/Linux and MacOS X using Mono 2.4 (or later).

Features

• Organize your novel using a 'project'.
• Add chapters to the project.
• Add scenes, characters, items and locations.
• Display the word count for every file in the project, along with a total.
• Saves a log file every day, showing words per file and the total. (Tracks your progress)
• Saves automatic backups at user-specified intervals.
• Allows multiple scenes within chapters
• Viewpoint character, goal, conflict and outcome fields for each scene.
• Multiple characters per scene.
• Storyboard view, a visual layout of your work.
• Re-order scenes within chapters.
• Drag and drop of chapters, scenes, characters, items and locations.
• Automatic chapter renumbering.
• Unicode UTF-8 support.
• Can export to RTF, TXT, HTML, and LaTeX
• Export eBook - designed to export HTML specifically optimized for use with Calibre.
• Can import RTF files.

For more information

Check the site for more details. (This program is free.)

• yWriter5 - Currently under active development.
• yWriter4 - no longer maintained but does have ePUB output.