Most of today’s ebook readers offer a very nice feature: integrated dictionaries, that show the meaning or translation of a word by just tapping on it.
Regrettably the quality and coverage of these dictionaries is not that good and especially for languages other than Englisch, Spanish, French or German the offering is quite sparse.
There are lot of dictionaries around and most of them are even published under an open source licence. When I bought my Kobo and realized that the built-in English-German dictionary
is not exactly brilliant I started searching for alternatives. I stumbled upon a format description of
the Kobo dictionary and I found an open source dictionary that seemed to be quite comprehensive.
And that was the start of this project…
At the moment it supports 2 input formats (the above Beolingus Format and the
TEI format) and only one output format (for the Kobo, good guess),
but it is planned to be extended to support other input (e.g. StarDict) and output formats (e.g. for the Bookeen readers).