03-26-2009, 12:33 AM | #1 |
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EPUB books now available at Project Gutenberg
It was only a few months ago that Project Gutenberg announced an effort to make mobile editions of their titles available. This was of course big news, however, in my eyes the latest eBook format to be released by PG is even bigger.
Project Guternberg now has most of their titles available in the industry standard EPUB eBook format and free from any DRM (Digital Restrictions Management)! Although only embraced as an eBook standard within the last 12 months, it has been truly embraced by many big names including; Sony, Google, Penguin, Harper Collins and Adobe, to name but a few. There are also many EPUB readers, both software and hardware, that can read eBooks in this format. ... http://www.pg-news.org/20090320/epub...ect-gutenberg/ another article: http://www.epubbooks.com/blog/200903...rg-epub-bliss/ Google EPUB Quality? As Google does not proof read their scanned books, relying completely on the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software to produced the digital characters, the quality of the text themselves is not as good as archives like Project Gutenberg or websites that take their books from PG, such as Feedbooks.com. Then again, were are getting 500K free books with the potential to access another million Google books in the future. All in all, this has been a good week for the EPUB format. Last edited by Kris777; 03-26-2009 at 12:37 AM. |
03-26-2009, 01:13 AM | #2 |
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Excellent news!
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03-26-2009, 01:42 AM | #3 |
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Anybody else having trouble loading PG ePub books into their Sony 505? I've tried two ebooks and I just get a "Page Error!" screen on my 505. It doesn't matter if I transfer the books with calibre or the Sony Connect software.
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03-26-2009, 02:02 AM | #4 |
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Well yes, as always, the news were not as good as they first appeared. The epubs are largely incompatible (only smaller books can be opened), there are no outline TOCs, graphics are non-existant.
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03-26-2009, 02:42 AM | #5 |
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just convert them in calibre to epub that should fix that error. I dont know why the PG people didn't just use calibre in the first place.
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03-26-2009, 02:44 AM | #6 |
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Thanks for confirming, mtravellerh. I hope PG fixes it soon. I suppose I should drop them an email or something...
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03-26-2009, 02:46 AM | #7 |
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Thanks for the tip, Kovid. LOL, yeah, one wonders why they didn't use calibre. On the other hand, the PG blog announcing the ePub format did mention calibre as an ePub viewer along with Stanza.
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03-26-2009, 02:56 AM | #8 | |
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Quote:
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03-26-2009, 03:18 AM | #9 | |
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Quote:
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03-26-2009, 08:59 AM | #10 |
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The good quality is referring to the quality of proofreading (excellent!), not referring to the quality of the epubs. As far as those are concerned, just tell us what books you want and we will try to convert them to a good quality epub. PG's epubs are not up to the grade at the moment.
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03-26-2009, 11:17 AM | #11 |
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03-26-2009, 11:21 AM | #12 |
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It depends what books you look at. Modern PG books - those which come through the "Distributed Proofreaders" project - are generally pretty good. The older books (which includes most of the classics) were generally produced by individuals and tend to be much poorer. Worst of all are the VERY old ones, which were generally typed in by hand, and not infrequently omit large chunks of text.
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03-26-2009, 11:29 AM | #13 |
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This is just one example, so take it for what it is.
I downloaded the book 'Cranford' in ePub from PG to my Sony PRS-505, and could hardly read it because it was taking 2-3 seconds per page turn. I downloaded the same title from the Google-Sony store, and it pageturned normally. It contained a few OCR errors, but nothing I couldn't puzzle out while reading. I'm new to the 505, only had it a few days, so I have no idea why this was happening. Kate |
03-28-2009, 12:49 AM | #14 | |
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book 1: title: The Outline of Science, Vol 1 Author J. Arthur Thomson and second book: Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome by E.M. Berens - both books in EPUB format and both books illustrated with many pictures and it looks very good on my jetBook screen and I didn't find any typo and errors in both texts When I downloaded 2 ePUB books from Google-Sony store - Faust and Harmonies of Nature - the quality of pictures looks not so good and both books have many OCR errors. Just two examples:"Stiffened by the Cold 6f winter" and "The water qf the atmosphere is the matrix that electric,or,tq speak mere properly..." I understand that 500,000 books sounds very cool but quality must be acceptable. I don't like read books (even for free) with incorrect words... Maybe somebody like to guess the meaning of the word qf...but not me. Last edited by Kris777; 03-28-2009 at 12:52 AM. |
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