Just dropping a note from twitter-land to let everyone know that Scott Sigler (http://www.scottsigler.com/) has gotten permission from his publisher to give away electronic copies of his new hardcover book, Infected. (For those not familiar with Scott Sigler, he is known for his horror/sci-fi audiobooks)

From his blog:

Crown Publishing is letting me give away the PDF of INFECTED from March 27 through March 31, leading up to the hardcover in-store release on April 1. So download it! Feel free to email the link to anyone you know.
Please do not email the PDF, email the LINK.
This is so I can prove to Crown the value in giving away content, and if your friends click on the link, that counts on their server stats - emailing the PDF doesn't count on the stats.
THANKS & ENJOY!

Get Infected here (http://www.scottsigler.com/node/1196).

Thanks for the info. Downloaded..

well, i certainly will *not* read this novel (my imagination is far too overactive, no horror for me thank you or i would have to leave all the lights on all night and risk getting no sleep for weeks...) however i think it is a good initiative and i want to help him prove his point to the editor, so i have downloaded it as well.

I've just downloaded the book and will attempt to convert it to LRF.

Merci for posting this. Always nice to be able to have a look at an author for free before buying his stuff =)

PS: JS if you manage to convert it in a satisfactory manner could you pass the LRF along to me? I would be very much obliged because that would save me some time and it seems you're doing it already anyways :P

thx! every instinct in me tried to resist downloading a file off the internet blatantly labelled "infected", but I snagged it right away regardless :wink:

thx! every instinct in me tried to resist downloading a file off the internet blatantly labelled "infected"
hee ! i had that reaction too...

I just took a look at the PDF and this look like the serial episodes put together into one PDF to make a whole. It's filled with "enter InfectedNovel.com for more" all over the place. This will have to be stripped out for sure. I hope the hard cover doesn't have this mess all through it.

Nice, even tough I would have prefered a .prc file.

well, i certainly will *not* read this novel (my imagination is far too overactive, no horror for me thank you or i would have to leave all the lights on all night and risk getting no sleep for weeks...) however i think it is a good initiative and i want to help him prove his point to the editor, so i have downloaded it as well.

Ditto!! I'll download it for the message, but doubt if I'll read it.

I have used the pdflrf (http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=13135&highlight=pdflrf)program to process the pdf file for the Sony Reader.

I have just run a linux (well, FreeBSD ;-) ) command
./pdflrflinux-0.99 --input=infected_novel.pdf --output=infected_novel.pdf.lrf

and the result stunned me beyond belief.
Holy $DEITY !
pdfrlf has produced absolutely unbelievable results just with out-of-the-box settings.

Somehow when I try to open it my Cybook restarts, anyone else experienced this problem?

I downloaded the .pdf, but I won't be reading it most likely. I pre-ordered the hard copy when I heard it was coming out from a major publisher.

If I remember correctly, Sigler also did this with the release of Ancestor. Nice trend by him.

I tried converting it from PDF using pdf2lrf, and it did a reasonable job. However it still has the some garbled header text, page numbers, and the link on each page. Any easy way to tidy it up a bit?

I opened it with Foxit Reader Pro then saved it as a text file, works great

I opened it with Foxit Reader Pro then saved it as a text file, works great
Of course you do know you've lost all the italics that way.

I downloaded Mr. Sigler's book, because I want to support ebook awareness and commerce. But I am again disappointed that what would seem to be a great advertisement for an author is hijacked by sloppy delivery.

Because the PDF is formatted with "Kluge" it makes it difficult to transfer to a reader, and since it is an author I am not familiar with, I am unlikely to do the difficult clean-up necessary to make it readable. And if the publishers believe that reading a book from a computer screen is what "digital books" is all about, they are making a mistake.

Perhaps the publishers do feel that digital reading is not something that can work, and by releasing the book as a difficult to deal with PDF, they are just assuring that it will fail.

I would almost prefer they release a couple of chapters in a more ebook friendly fashion. If the format were more user friendly, then we could at least read the "teaser" chapters easily and decide if it were worth the money to buy the whole book. which would then could be released even with dreaded DRM, but in multiple formats for all reader hardware.

I downloaded Mr. Sigler's book, because I want to support ebook awareness and commerce. But I am again disappointed that what would seem to be a great advertisement for an author is hijacked by sloppy delivery.

Because the PDF is formatted with "Kluge" it makes it difficult to transfer to a reader, and since it is an author I am not familiar with, I am unlikely to do the difficult clean-up necessary to make it readable. And if the publishers believe that reading a book from a computer screen is what "digital books" is all about, they are making a mistake.

Perhaps the publishers do feel that digital reading is not something that can work, and by releasing the book as a difficult to deal with PDF, they are just assuring that it will fail.

I would almost prefer they release a couple of chapters in a more ebook friendly fashion. If the format were more user friendly, then we could at least read the "teaser" chapters easily and decide if it were worth the money to buy the whole book. which would then could be released even with dreaded DRM, but in multiple formats for all reader hardware.

Scott Sigler is one of the first people who released their fiction as podcast novels. Right now, he's currently podcasting this version of Infected. So, you can go and listen to the novel as he releases chapters at podiobooks.com (http://podiobooks.com/title/infected).

I know it's not an e-book solution, but it will at least let you sample the book and decide if it's worth a shot.

I downloaded Mr. Sigler's book, because I want to support ebook awareness and commerce. But I am again disappointed that what would seem to be a great advertisement for an author is hijacked by sloppy delivery.

Because the PDF is formatted with "Kluge" it makes it difficult to transfer to a reader, and since it is an author I am not familiar with, I am unlikely to do the difficult clean-up necessary to make it readable. And if the publishers believe that reading a book from a computer screen is what "digital books" is all about, they are making a mistake.

Perhaps the publishers do feel that digital reading is not something that can work, and by releasing the book as a difficult to deal with PDF, they are just assuring that it will fail.

I would almost prefer they release a couple of chapters in a more ebook friendly fashion. If the format were more user friendly, then we could at least read the "teaser" chapters easily and decide if it were worth the money to buy the whole book. which would then could be released even with dreaded DRM, but in multiple formats for all reader hardware.
I've managed to clean up most of the kludge in the PDF after i converted it to HTML and then loaded it into Book Designer. Not that hard. Now I just will go through the PDF and see if there is any special formatting I need t deal with and I should hopefully be done.

I've been a fan of Scott Sigler's podiobooks for two years now. Even though they are "Horror stories" his way of reading them lestens the drama in such a way that it sometimes becomes funny. I would not read those stories but listening to them is very entertaining, especially while in the woodshop.

Scott Sigler is one of the first people who released their fiction as podcast novels. Right now, he's currently podcasting this version of Infected. So, you can go and listen to the novel as he releases chapters at podiobooks.com (http://podiobooks.com/title/infected).

I know it's not an e-book solution, but it will at least let you sample the book and decide if it's worth a shot.

Thanks, plantedbypiggies, I will give that a try.

I've managed to clean up most of the kludge in the PDF after i converted it to HTML and then loaded it into Book Designer. Not that hard. Now I just will go through the PDF and see if there is any special formatting I need t deal with and I should hopefully be done.

I may try that this weekend. I am a n00bi3 at Book Designer, and this might be a good opportunity to gain some skilz.

Anyone have a nice clean lrf conversion of this? I downloaded it from the link but I'm on a MAC and am limited to libprs for conversion. I can't get it without all the isbn and author info at the top of every page along with some poor formatting and page break issues.

podcasts -> great for the gym! thx for the heads up.

Thanks, plantedbypiggies, I will give that a try.

Yeah, no problem. I hope you enjoy it!

I'll be attempting to convert to LRF maybe on Monday or Tuesday. I cannot guarantee a perfect conversion. Not until it's been fully read. But I did fix all the fi and fl issues and that's good. The only other issues left I think would be broken paragraphs. I'll post an Obelisk diff once I have one to post and all you'll need is the PDF, Python, and the attached ZIP file.

Start downloading....
Oh no! BAD Connection!

Passing along modified versions of this book would be copyright infringment.

Notice in pdf file:
Copyright © 2008 by Scott Sigler All rights reserved.

And you can read in the first post of this thread that the author requests that you don't even spread the pdf file, and instead send your friends to download it from the publisher.

I LOVE that it's a mobile read moderator who is talking about spreading the file illegally. You going to post it here too? Tell me again about how much you people respect the law, and even more so, how much you respect this author and appreciate that he gave you the book for free.

Passing along modified versions of this book would be copyright infringment.

Notice in pdf file:
Copyright © 2008 by Scott Sigler All rights reserved.

And you can read in the first post of this thread that the author requests that you don't even spread the pdf file, and instead send your friends to download it from the publisher.

I LOVE that it's a mobile read moderator who is talking about spreading the file illegally. You going to post it here too? Tell me again about how much you people respect the law, and even more so, how much you respect this author and appreciate that he gave you the book for free.
Nope, it's NOT illegal. It's a diff file. You need to already have the original PDF in order to use the diff file. Without having the original PDF, it won't be of any use. It's perfectly legal.

If you want to know more about it, search for Obelisk.

Nope, it's NOT illegal. It's a diff file. You need to already have the original PDF in order to use the diff file. Without having the original PDF, it won't be of any use. It's perfectly legal.

If you want to know more about it, search for Obelisk.

Ok, if you're not talking about passing around a modified version of the book, then you're right, it's not illegal. I misunderstood.

Ok, if you're not talking about passing around a modified version of the book, then you're right, it's not illegal. I misunderstood.
The diff file won't be of any use without the original PDF. So no, I am not giving out a direct readable copy of this book.

I find it interesting though that we are discussing piracy and such in the other topic and we are talking about format shifting here :) Seems a little curious.. partially because the Infected LRX is for sale on Sony's store for $17.00.

Sunday I will take a stab at the conversion for Infected. If I can do a decent LRF version, then I can also do decent Mobipocket and IMP version as well. But, you'll need Python and the original PDF in order to get these versions as all I'll be posting are diffs and the Obelisk program.

I find it interesting though that we are discussing piracy and such in the other topic and we are talking about format shifting here :) Seems a little curious.. partially because the Infected LRX is for sale on Sony's store for $17.00.

It's also on sale at the fictionwise (http://www.fictionwise.com/eBooks/eBook65935.htm?cache)/ebookwise (http://www.ebookwise.com/eBookwise/eBooks/eBook65935.htm?cache) websites. I picked it up for my 1150 in addition to the hardcover that I purchased.

Thanks PBP, much better deal at fictionwise. More cost upfront (25$) but with the micropay rebate it comes out at $11.50.

But since it is only in .lit format, I am gonna have to convert it. Anyone want to sue me for making the file usable... go ahead.

I finally found some time to work on Infected. Once I am done with the first pass, I'll post a DIFF for LRF, PRC, and IMP. But I'll also require people who read it to pick up any formatting errors for me such as bad paragraph breaks. I think that will be all that may be wrong once I am done sometime this week.

What is taking some time is to format all the other worldly speak. And I am not sure how this will turn out in a PRC edition. But we'll see.

I am using Book Designer. And if anyone has any idea on how to change the font in the other worldly speak, so it looks different in a PRC, please let me know.

I just finished this book. Awesome!

I'll giver it a go once I finish formatting it sometime this week.