Blub's Blog

burgr - Books in your Terminal

I spend most of my time writing code in a full screen terminal. I like to read books on my breaks and I'm a big fan of Project Gutenberg, which has over 70,000 books freely available (note, these are legal copyright free books).

I wrote burgr, a program to browse and search a catalog of available books, download and manage my personal library and read these books - from within the comfort of the terminal.

I can work away programming, take a break and switch instantly to another tmux pane where I have burgr waiting to continue reading where I left off :-)

I wrote this for my own use, so perhaps the UI is a little idiosyncratic, but I like it! (See I am The Only User).

Books are downloaded from mirrors of the Project Gutenberg site, not the site itself, so meeting their terms.

The catalog can be downloaded and updated as new books are released by running burgr with the update command argument.

Here are some screen shots which will give you a flavour of burgr.

Catalog screen

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Library screen (all the books you have downloaded)

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Recents screen

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Reading a book

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Searching the catalog for sci fi books :-)

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Blub

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