These weeks I’m feeling more nerd than ususal, therefore I’ve decided to tell you how to go from owning a Nintendo DS to owning an ebook reader.
With one device.

So, to explain things throughoutly I have to tell you that I got my shiny Nintendo almost a year ago, on Pixmania, a website that has different european addresses. It was abargain with Bluestore, and ten minutes after I placed my order a girl from the store that sold me the Nintendo called me to say that if I wanted it pronto they could send me one right away, but it wasn’t green as I asked, if not I had to wait till the following day to have the green one. I could wait 😀
It arrived in five days time.

Then I had to buy also an R4 card with a micro sd, otherwise the homebrew software to turn a DS into an ereader wouldn’t have had room!
I ordered the card on a R4 website, you could find many discording opinions about it, and I have to say that it was not a very clear website (I ended up ordering just the card, without micro sd, luckily I had one at home), but I got everything allright. Anyway now it just gives kernels, guides and how tos.

Last but not least, serious business: I followed this tutorial on Girl Geek Dinner to make the transformation. It is in italian, but I’ll translate it shortly for you: you can choose between DS Reader (download here) or DS Libris (download here) program, you download it, extract it, and put all the contents in your micro sd. The ebook files will go into a folder or simply on the micro sd.
To convert your pdfs into usable files you may want to use online websites, but the one linked on the guide, to convert from pdf to txt is not working. So I used the command line, thanx to Mr Faun’s advice, and this is the command:
pdftotext {filesname.pdf} {filesname.txt}

It works on Ubuntu, I have no idea for others, sorry.
Make sure the names are spelled correctly and that they are in the “home” folder (because if you don’t specify any commands other than the ones I just gave you it will work in “home” folder).

Noe you have the txt you can use the second software linked, or you can convert the txt, with this online converter, to XHTML, and it has to be XHTML, because XTML XML HTML won’t work, the reader software won’t even see them.

In the end I choose, like the woman who wrote the guide did, the second software, the one that allows you to read in a “book position”. Also because the txts were all funny and filled with special keys.
With this I do not mean that XHTMLs are perfect, but I think this is a problem with the original pdf I had (free ebook with tons of formats, tables, images and co… maybe not the best to convert).

I am satisfied with the result, and at least I have a way to read all those free ebooks I downloaded time ago and I wasn’t reading because I don’t like to read too much on a pc screen 😛