After getting my Sony Reader I determined to find some free ebooks that I could read on it. I already knew about Project Gutenberg, but unfortunately, many of the free texts there are not available in a format that is readily accessible to the Sony Reader.
After some searching I was able to locate in addition to some RTF conversion tools such as the free Amber Converters, a couple of websites that already provided ebooks in RTF format. I didn't happen to find much in the way of LRF format at all, however, I did notice a marked decrease in the RTF file size for an ebook in comparison to the LRF files for the same text.
The two websites I found were
www.manybooks.net (my favorite for ease of use and nice presentation, as well as a great number of texts), and
www.munseys.com. I also discovered a conversion utility called HTMLtoRTF Converter (the free version) that makes it quite easy to obtain texts that are only available in HTML format or displayed on websites (just right click the website use the 'view source' option to save the html of the page to a text file and then use the converter to convert the text file).
Because of the more universally acceptable format of the RTF standard, it's immediate usability by the Sony Reader, its leaness of file size, and its simplicity, I decided that this would be the best format for me to use for all freely obtainable ebooks for my Sony Reader.
This was half of the battle in creating a consistent library of ebooks that could be managed efficiently. Consequently, it is my recommendation to the Sony Reader community to adopt the RTF format for freely obtainable ebooks and etexts.
The next stage in realizing a consistent library of ebooks was the ability to provide Author/Title information. Here enters the RTF Tools project. This tool, so far, is designed to select an rtf file in a directory, and update all of the Author information in that file as well as the remaining files in that directory with a single click of a button. The current release provided this ability, but is not without bugs. Eventually, it would be nice to clean up any bugs in the project, and add a separate form with which to edit the Title information in separate files. I envision a button to switch between the Author editing window and the Title editing window.
This little tool should help reduce the sheer amount of keystrokes and savvy needed to edit the Author information in the RTF files. The Author information is set up to automatically display in the Sony Reader Library as <LastName, FirstName>.
I have posted the project, including its source (written in C#), and the wndows binary here:
http://www.codeplex.com/rtftools/Wik...spx?title=Home
.NET will need to be installed in order to run the program.
Have fun ! And please feel free to modify and continue the original code as I am not certain how much time I will be able to devote to its continued development. Good luck and I hope this will be a useful tool for some of you if not all of you
-Mark