MobileRead offers hand formatted Sony Reader e-books (public domain)

[Bob Russell]

Did you know that there is a nice collection of classic works appearing at the Sony Reader Uploads section of our forums? Some of the works already available include e-books like the original Zorro ("the Scarlet Pimpernel of California"), and from authors such as the following:

* Edgar Rice Burroughs' (Tarzan collections)
* Jane Austen
* Edgar Allan Poe
* H. Rider Haggard (a multi-volume anthology)
* Charles Dickens
* H.G Wells
* Jules Verne

Feel free to take a look and download the books you are interested in. They are all manually formatted for the Sony Reader to provide a superior reading experience, likely to be much nicer than the equivalent offerings on original sources like Project Gutenberg or even the Sony Connect store.

We also encourage you to contribute yourself with some not copyrighted e-books formatted for the Sony Reader. There is even a very nice tutorial to get you started. Even if you don't contribute, you may want to take a look at the tutorial to get familiar with one approach to formatting books and preparing them for the Sony Reader.

We especially want to thank the newest MobileRead moderator, HarryT, who has initiated and coordinated this effort. He has seeded it with many books himself, and don't miss his great book descriptions! He also created the primary formatting tutorial, and nourishes the cooperative effort. It is exciting to see his work and the many others who are contributing significantly to this rich resource in many ways.

Contributions don't just include book uploads, but additional help with determination of copyright status (to make sure posted works are in the public domain, which is not always so easy to determine), or updates to the MobileRead wiki (see e-book conversion tools or e-book file formats or Book Designer, for example.)

This is an exciting beginning to a new collection of custom formatted e-books for the Sony Reader, and the community has really been delightfully helpful.

We don't want to forget, however, to highlight some of the many huge efforts toward making public domain books available to all of us. And some of them even provide some form of automated conversions to Sony Reader formats. Distributed Proofreaders, Project Gutenberg, ManyBooks, Blackmask Online (now via Silk Pagoda) and others are on the front lines and bring us huge digital libraries of great works. Due to the vast numbers of books, only the cream of the crop will ever be hand formatted for specific devices, but we want to give credit to those giant shoulders on which we are standing.

So if you have a Sony Reader, go check it out, grab a book, and after enjoying it maybe you'll catch the wave and add some books yourself!

[Leaping Gnome]

Another thanks to Harry for spearheading this effort!