Have used about 10 of my free 100. What are your recommendations? What are some that not easily available elsewhere? (here, for example).

Thanks! :)

Don't get any. Instead, download the ebooks from here, www.feedbooks.com, and www.blackmask.com. The ebooks will be of a higher quality and free.

They're free, so... :D

I don't remember exactly which ones I got from Sony but the versions here were all much better (better format, fewer errors, etc.).

They're free, so... :D
No they are NOT free.
They are locked to your Reader using DRM.
Besides, they are UGLY
You get much, much better "quality" after a few minutes formatting the book from the Project Gutenberg using OpenOffice.org
If you want to convert a bunch of books, just record a macro.

My suggested macro (once you get the text without hard breaks inside paragraphs - there are quite a few tricks amd macros published in other threads)
- Format -> page -> margins -> top, bottom, left and right 0.1 cm (you want to use all that nice screen for reading and not waste a large margin
- select all text
- Format - > font -> Arial (or helvetica, or any sans-serif font), size 16
- Format -> Paragraph -> Justification, left, First line indent 0.5 cm, space after paragraph 0.2cm
- Save result as an rtf file

You can also try Microsoft word, or Bookdesigner

It is important to experiment.
After 20 minutes of work you find out what layout is the best for YOU, and the next several thousand books will take you couple of minutes each to format individually.

Also, check the E-Books link on the top of this page.
I guarantee, the books here are much better formated than that ... aehm ... free (Phew!) "classics" from Sony. And they are *really* free. No strings attached. You can read them wherever you want using whatever device you fancy.

To answer your original question :D
I am not aware of any book that would be available from Sonny Connect "clasics" that is not available elsewhere for free. Really free.

No they are NOT free.
They are locked to your Reader using DRM.
Besides, they are UGLY


Well, ok, but they really are FREE, as in, they don't cost a penny under the various Sony signup offers. I don't read electronic documents on other devices, so DRM doesn't matter at all.

If all of the Sony Classics are available elsewhere in better format, well, OK. But if some are not, it would be worth dl'ing them from Sony FREE of charge. And some people really don't want to be bothered with converting formats. Really. (The upload forum here *is* a great source for Sony-format books tho. And the SilkPagoda $10 DVD is a great deal for a ton of lrf-format books in decent format.)

But with the Sony offer, the 50 classics are indeed "free." :p

100 books :D

Back to the question at hand, I've downloaded about 70 of my allotted 100. I did it by browsing what they had available, and also searching for authors that I like. For example, I've got most of the Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and D. H. Lawrence, Mark Twain, Dostoevsky, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Edith Wharton and Oscar Wilde books available. I've also grabbed favorites I have in paper form, like most of the Shakespeare plays and Alice in Wonderland. Everything else is just books that sound interesting, like Dante's Diving Comedy and Gogol's Dead Souls.
I'm earnestly trying to get all 100 books before my coupon expires at the end of January. I'd love to see what other people have gotten.
Also, I realize that these books are available for free in various formats all over the net. I also realize that it's ridiculously easy to download and install a book bought from Sony, without having to worry about formatting. If I decide some day down the road to buy a different device and can no longer read the Sony books, I can just redownload these books from here or manybooks.net.

You have to download them by the end of January? I thought that as long as you -registered- by the end of January you got the credit, but the credit itself didn't expire?

Is there an easy way to tell how many book credits you have left? I also wonder what happens if by mistake you "buy" the same book twice?

Maybe I misunderstood the coupon, I'm not actually sure what that expiration date meant.
When you use the coupon in the store it will show the name of the coupon and in parentheses it will say how many you have left. ie "100 Free Classics Coupon (60)". I may not have the wording right, but you get the idea.

The expiration is just to get the credits.

I ended up just getting everything in the Featured Page (I had 10 already, some from that page) and that took me up to 95, and then I just grabbed 5 more at random.

I have $27 left over for the store. Probably just going to wait until the day before it expires to use it. Bought Stephen King's On Writing and Choosing A Jewish Life (No, not by Stephen King :D). Also Stephen Colbert's I Am America (And So Can You), which was a steal at $10.XX... most other places have it at $17.XX.


Now I have tons of books to read ! :)

Edit: I went over the credits but got some books I've been wanting to read. Picked up the following for ~$10 at the store after $50 credit:

Choosing A Jewish Life
On Writing
I Am America (And So Can You)
A Short History Of Nearly Everything
Einstein
The Nine
The Best Book Of Useless Information

The pricing is really not expensive. I can see a new addiction forming :(

For the 100 Classics, the email you get after registering says "Your 100 free eBooks Classics credit is good until February 29, 2008, so be sure to download all of your free titles by then."

Mind you, I rather suspect that I'll not use any of them, as unless I'm mistaken, they're all PD items that will almost certainly be available (with better formatting) from here...

Well, ok, but they really are FREE, as in, they don't cost a penny under the various Sony signup offers. I don't read electronic documents on other devices, so DRM doesn't matter at all.

If all of the Sony Classics are available elsewhere in better format, well, OK. But if some are not, it would be worth dl'ing them from Sony FREE of charge. And some people really don't want to be bothered with converting formats. Really. (The upload forum here *is* a great source for Sony-format books tho. And the SilkPagoda $10 DVD is a great deal for a ton of lrf-format books in decent format.)

But with the Sony offer, the 50 classics are indeed "free." :p

It's so hard to recommend books to someone else who hasn't said what type of reading she prefers (romance, mystery, sci-fi, history, biography, cooking, medical, ancient, 19th-century fiction, American, British, foreign language, etc).

As to the SilkPagoda books, I bought the DVD and find that I'm not overly thrilled with the page layout of the books. I bought it because there are a lot of things there which aren't available at Project Gutenberg (or here). I've gone through it and for those works not available elsewhere I've renamed the files to something meaningful in this format:
authorlastname -- title.lrf example: Twain -- Huckleberry Finn.lrf
so that I can organize them easily and clearly on my computer for moving to the reader when I want.

But for every book which is available at PG, I simply run a special program originally written for making PG books better on the Librie (it removes all the singe hard-returns so the lines flow properly but keeps the double hard-returns for the paragraph separation) and do nothing else. I have no problem reading them at the S font size setting, but they're fine at M and L also for those who need larger fonts. And I don't need tables of contents with links to chapters for those books I read (fiction, mostly mystery) so all the fancying up that people have done on this forum is overkill for my uses.

I have begun to experiment with libprs500 because the book size is smaller, but it gets old having to change the settings for the top, bottom and side margins each time and I haven't found a way to make my settings the default yet, so I haven't done too many that way. I do like how it improves the books, but with many thousands of titles on my computer I don't have the time to convert them all. And then there's the fact that it writes brand new folders each time it saves the book files and resaves the text files, so it is currently more bother than I currently have time for. It is a marvelous program and easier than BookDesigner, although I have begun to investigate that as well but the same time constraints are in place.

So I simply read the PG text files I have massaged as indicated above.

Perhaps you can print out a list of the classics available at the sony Connect site and then compare that list with what's available either here or at PG or on the BlackMask disc (list of books is viewable online) and then download any from the sony site which aren't at the other two sites. And by all means, buy the BlackMask disc!

And for anybody who wants it, the DVD of the PG library as of July of 2007 (first 20,000 books, they claim -- or was it 15,000?) is available for free if you can't download it. I have made a couple of donations to the PG work over the years and encourage others to do the same. They encourage people to make copies of the DVD themselves and forward them to friends. Trying to download the DVD iso files is a real pain and takes a long time.

I downladed a few of them from Sony myself. I was so dissapointed by the quality I deleted them. EVEY SINGLE ONE of the books I wanted have been converted from Gutenberg by PEOPLE WHO CARE IMMENSELY and take tremendous time and trouble to format them. People like Harry (Who deserves a medal made out of Gold) i suspect that whoever converts the classics for Sony connect gets the text from Gutenberg and then just slaps them together.

Get your classics here. They are so much better and easier to download.

I'd recommend downloading Book Designer and learning to use it. Its a little frustrating at first but by using Harry's tutorial (Somewhere on this site) and a few hours, soon you will be converting your own Public Domain books with ease and you can make them the way YOU want!!!

Roy

10,000 classic ebooks in Sony LRF format on DVD for $9.99 (USD). I have this and it is a GREAT DEAL!!!

http://www.silkpagoda.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=650

By using your PC, copy the desired books from the DVD to an SD card via a USB 2.0 card reader. Then insert your card into the Sony reader.

When I got my 505, I scanned the connect stores entire classic offerring before downloading anything. For example I like the individual Shakespeare plays versus buying them in a compendum that doesn't have links to each play. Each play equalled 1 classic book but that's alright with me. Some of the classic "books" are actually short stories (some of the Oscar Wilde offerrings are that way like The Canterville Ghost).