Mailund on the Internet

I have a bunch of ebooks in Microsoft’s .lit format, but I want to read them on my Linux box.  I tried installing Microsoft Reader through wine, but that doesn’t work for me.  It will pop up and crash down again just as fast.

I used to use the Openberg Firefox addon, but it has not been updated to Firefox 3 so that is not an option any more.

So now I just need to extract the files and then I can read the damn books as html.

There’s a program for doing this called clit (really it is, I am not making it up).  You can get it here.

To make it sligthly easier for me to extract the files I wrote a small script:

#!/bin/bash

for litfile in "$@"; do
    dir=`dirname "$litfile"`
    outdir=$dir/`basename "$litfile" .lit`/
    clit "$litfile" "$outdir"
done

and added it to my nautilus-actions.

Excellent, now I can just right-click on the files I want to extract, and viola I have the html hidden under the .lit file.