U. of C. Press: 700 Free Online E-Books

[Prestidigitweeze]

Though they can only be read on the web, 700 formerly expensive and sometimes out-of-print books from University of California Press are now available for free.

The public list (which contains 700 books) is available here.

If you're interested in poetics and/or criticism, this is a motherlode of prose. I recommend The Collected Essays of Robert Creeley and ABC of Influence, by Christopher Beach.

Fans of Mark Twain might be interested in Dangerous Intimacy, which tells the following story:

Shortly after his wife's death in 1904, Twain basked in the attentions of Isabel Lyon, his flirtatious - and calculating - secretary. Lyon desperately wanted to marry her boss, who was almost thirty years her senior. She managed to exile Twain's youngest daughter, Jean, who had epilepsy. With the help of Twain's assistant, Ralph Ashcroft, who fraudulently acquired power of attorney over the author's finances, Lyon nearly succeeded in assuming complete control over Twain's life and estate. Fortunately, Twain recognized the plot being woven around him just in time.

[curtw]

Thanks! Six Screenplays By Robert Riskin is right up my alley. It includes:

• Platinum Blonde
• American Madness
• It Happened One Night
• Mr. Deeds Goes to Town
• Lost Horizon
• Meet John Doe

[piperclassique]

Ooh, nice! Now I wonder if they will save to Instapaper?

[Jessica Lares]

Originally Posted by piperclassique

Ooh, nice! Now I wonder if they will save to Instapaper?

They have a print view mode, so I think it might work.

AWESOME site, some amazing works.

[doubleshuffle]

GrabMyBooks does work on the print view. Amazing resource!

[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by doubleshuffle

GrabMyBooks does work on the print view. Amazing resource!

Looking at an epub-converted copy of ABC of Influence in Sigil, I see that the output could benefit from a bit of reformatting (floating page numbers, etc.), but also that it is quite readable. Thanks for mentioning that Firefox addon!

[slex]

There are interesting titles there. Thanks!

[owly]

I was able to use Pocket on the print view.

[nkd431]

Print view, save as htm, import into calibre, convert to mobi or epub. I am sure calibre can rid the ebook of the floating page numbers. I personally can ignore them as the rest of the formatting is fine, no hard page returns or anything like that.

[Prestidigitweeze]

Question:

A lot of the U. of C. books are scholarly and therefore contain copious footnotes. In print mode, these are formatted simply as running text at the bottom of each page.

Is there an easy way to convert them back to footnotes in Calibre, Sigil, etc.?

[doubleshuffle]

Ask pynch. He's the footnote champion.

What I did with the two I've epubified so far is just running a search and replace, replacing

 <p>[

with

 <p class="small">[

and put

.small {font-size: 0.8em}

in the stylesheet. That works fine for me - makes the footnotes smaller, setting them off from the text, and keeps them where they are, which is close enough to their anchor in the text to get there and back with one or two page turns.

That's good enough for me until I find one that I really want to turn into a beauty.

[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by doubleshuffle

Ask pynch. He's the footnote champion.

Thanks for the response and the search-and-replace formatting duct tape.

I'm not about to bother Pynch with something as selfish as this. I still owe him an email re some research he asked me to do in the City and, besides, he's doing for ebooks what Pound wanted to do for civilization (do you know the poem in which Pound's being kept awake by the thought of what America would be like if "the Classics had a wide circulation"?). Unfortunately, I now live far away from the library that Pynch asked me to visit and have been dealing with a music project I'd have to be bonkers to wave away. It involves learning lots of new software, but the rewards could allow me to take a year off to write once the work is finished.

I wanted to be the nutria of good news, but, unfortunately, I've been silence's vole instead.