e-Book Requests and Begging (Public Domain Books Only!)

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Wuld it be possible when making books to not ZIP or RAR them when attaching? LRF is a pretty efficient format as is and the RAR and ZIP process just makes it one more step to get the books on our reader. There really is no need for further compression.

The reason for using ZIP (or RAR) is not really for compression; it's more due to the fact that it's a file extension "known" to web browsers, mail gateways, etc. I quite often download stuff from work, and e-mail it to myself at home. Our corporate mail gateway (along with many other virus scanners) will remove any attachments that it considers to be potentially dangerous. ZIP goes through just fine - LRF gets stripped off as potentially risky. ZIP is by far the safest way to "package" an attachment, regardless of compression. It's only a couple of mouse click to unzip it on a Windows system.

Another reason I personally ZIP all my books is that in the LRF I use file names with spaces, but I replace the spaces with "_" in the ZIP.

Eg "The Old Man in the Corner.lrf"

but:

"The_Old_Man_in_the_corner.zip"

Some systems have problems with filenames with spaces in them.

Now for those of you who do like to have line spaces between paragraphs, would you please create two copies of the book? One with the line spaces and one without. The spaces make more pages and lower battery life and I am not really find of them. And if the book is supposed to have spaces at some points in the book, then the line spaces after every paragrph make it look confusing.

I really think you're going a little far in dictating formatting requirements to people who create books . They are giving up their time (and it takes a fair few hours to create a nice book) to create these books, and they are formatting them the way that they personally think is good. If you want a book formatted to your exact requirements, the answer is to do it yourself .

I happen to share your preference for no blank lines betwen paragraphs, but that's just my personal preference. If someone wants to upload a book which has blank lines between the paragraphs, I'll still be grateful to them for that.

It's not always a trivial job to remove blanks. It depends on the source format.

[RWood]

Originally Posted by Roy White

Ok. Here's one... I worked and worked on my version of Book Designer trying to make this happen but every time I try to click 'make book' The program crashes... aaaarrrgggghhh.... Anyhow my Dad's favorite poem is Tennysons 'Charge of the light brigade.' He would qoute the entire poem relishing every phrase when I was a kid.

He's in heaven now....

Anyhow I'd love to have this poem in a portavble reader when i'm in the mood to remember Dad. I'll probably make it as a RTF file but I found some great photos on the web to put in there....

Any artists out there?

If "hack" is a type of artist, ok. It has been posted.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The reason for using ZIP (or RAR) is not really for compression; it's more due to the fact that it's a file extension "known" to web browsers, mail gateways, etc. I quite often download stuff from work, and e-mail it to myself at home. Our corporate mail gateway (along with many other virus scanners) will remove any attachments that it considers to be potentially dangerous. ZIP goes through just fine - LRF gets stripped off as potentially risky. ZIP is by far the safest way to "package" an attachment, regardless of compression. It's only a couple of mouse click to unzip it on a Windows system.

Another reason I personally ZIP all my books is that in the LRF I use file names with spaces, but I replace the spaces with "_" in the ZIP.

Eg "The Old Man in the Corner.lrf"

but:

"The_Old_Man_in_the_corner.zip"

Some systems have problems with filenames with spaces in them.

I never knew the LRF extension was used for other things. So yeah it makes sense then to ZIP them.

I really think you're going a little far in dictating formatting requirements to people who create books . They are giving up their time (and it takes a fair few hours to create a nice book) to create these books, and they are formatting them the way that they personally think is good. If you want a book formatted to your exact requirements, the answer is to do it yourself .

I happen to share your preference for no blank lines betwen paragraphs, but that's just my personal preference. If someone wants to upload a book which has blank lines between the paragraphs, I'll still be grateful to them for that.

It's not always a trivial job to remove blanks. It depends on the source format.

It really isn't that much of an effort to strip the extra lines using word (IMHO). But one thing I shall be doing for the next book I convert will also be to post the BD source so others can see how it looks and maybe it'll help with learning to use BD. Plus it also means if someone wants to change how I've done something, he/she can easily do so. No, I'm not trying to dictate how things be done. Only suggesting. There is an option in BD for adding a line space between paragraphs when making the LRF. So I was thinking that was what was being used in the books that have line spaces. And in that case it's just a matter of not selecting it when writing out the book.

[RWood]

I just counted and we already have over 240 books (unique titles) available for download at MobileRead. Even if we assume a low sale of the century price of $4.99 per volume this is still over $1,200 (US) worth of books and many of them are omnibus editions that may easily sell for ten times that price.

I think we all owe Harry a great deal of thanks for starting this upload section on 28 March 2007 with his first book, Complete Sherlock Holmes.

[NatCh]

Here, here! Bravo! To HarryT and the several others who have done a lot of hunching over keyboards to make it happen.

[Bob Russell]

Absolutely! This is really spectacular stuff, and not only are there great books, but they are done so very well. Not to mention that reading them is going to be a thousand times more fun because they come from our very own MR friends!

Thanks so much to Harry and Wood and Roy and Dr Drib and Travis, and not just them, but a bunch more of the "less prolific" contributers also! (It's always dangerous to mention names, though, because I probably left some people out... thanks so much to everyone who has participated, and forgive me if your name is missing!)

Plus, don't forget the incredible custom artwork that Travis has added. Just unbelievable! In the midst of all the depressing copyright and DRM news, this emerges as a delightful ray of sunshine in the content world!

P.S. I hope you guys are keeping all your BookDesigner files for that day when we want these books in other formats for other devices! Not only are there folks now with other devices that are probably very jealous, but we may all find that in less than 5 years from now there will be another star format for the newest and greatest generation of e-book readers!

Of course, this library of books is so nice, that I think the Sony Reader is guaranteed to remain important to each of us in combination with any spectacular future e-book devices. Not just because of the sentimental attachment that reading so many books on it brings, but because it's worth keeping the Reader around long term just for access to this library. Like Wood says, it's already like a $1200 library of nicely formatted works.

[Roy White]

Plus. Once you figure out how to do it... Its a little addicting!

I spent about an hour, maybe an hour and a half yesterday going through the text of Les Miserables. I was using the book element tool to find the titles. And Book Designer had assigned the "Chapter 1" etc. (Text in the raw TXT file I got from gutenberg) as Chapter titles. (Which means that on the bottom of the reader, (Chapter 1) Would appear... Unacceptabe, (To me) and first and foremost I'm making these for me and sharing them here.... because i didnt want to take the time to delete the "Chapter 22" text, (I made the compromise of leaving the text so it would appear on the reader but i didnt want it on the bottom of each page in the chapter) ((I hope everyone is following)) I was using the 'subtitle button to change the Chapter 1 text into subtitles, then going to the REAL chapter titles below, highlighting it and clicking "Title so THAT would read at the bottom of each page in that chapter in the reader.. A long tedious process indeed. Finally when i finished i clicked make book and had too many other programs opened. the program crashed, I lost EVERYTHING!!!!!!!! I almost said a bad word! My wife was waiting patiently to go on a motorcycle ride so i left to go.. When i came home i thought. Ok.. I'm just going to make the book so i can read it and i will deal with the stupid Chapter 16 at the bottom of the page on the reader.. I opoened elements again just for the heck of it and noticed a button at the bottom of the element window that said. "Change element to... " A bell rung. So.. This is awesome.. I had the element finder find all the titles, They were listed as the hated 'Chapter 77" etc on the element window. (And in les miserable theres about 15 million chapters because Hugo wrote every 6 paragraphs and started a new chapter in this book) I selected the top one, held down shift, selected the bottom one highlighting them all.. Then clicked the drop down list at the bottom.. found delete.. Clicked.. Dudes and dudettes. ALL those stupid "Chapter 44 etc, dissapeared at one fell swoop! Then... I had the element tool find all Subtitles... (The REAL chapter titles) Selected all, then CHANGED THEM TO TITLES at one fell swoop. Walla! in exactly 28 seconds accomplished what took me over an hour!!!! A west texas yell flowed out of my mouth! The dogs barked for blocks around my house.

I hope those of you who dont care about the PROCESS skipped reading all that but to those of you who want space between paragraphs and etc..

You can see, besides rewriting the etire text, how difficult that would be and most of the books I've done so far, I havent read yet, or I've read parts of, or heard about that book and have it on my "To read" list.

And this reader is AWESOME because now i dont have to truck down to the library to find, then check out, and return!!!

So...

I'm happy to make em... But the finest details...
Hopefully I can keep finding fast ways to fix them like I did with the "Convert elements tool"

Maybe that Convert all elements trick will work good for some of the rest of you who are using Book Designer?
You prolly already use it.

Roy

[Roy White]

Well. Those of you who dont like empty paragraphs. I've got good news. You can use the element browser part of Book Designer to find empty paragraphs aaaannndd.. Delete them en masse!

Totally sweet. It also works for all the other mistakes and mis0guesses Book Designer does on raw text.

Book Designer geeks take notice!

[tsgreer]

Thanks Bob! And thanks to everyone for contributing stuff and making this forum so great! We have such a great selection on here now! Many great authors who I haven't heard of or tried before. I have a LOT of reading to do.

My Reader is full of great stuff. I don't even have any current authors on there because of all the great stuff that has been posted to this forum. Great reading to be had here...

Who says you can't get anything good for free anymore?! Well, OK, if you don't count the price of the reader...BUT I think we have the Sony connect store beat when it comes to price and ease of use...

One of my co-workers just bought a Reader and she was wondering where to get content since she was having problems with the Sony store. I pointed her here and said "start there, they have all the info and content you need to get started..."

[UncleDuke]

if you could find all of it in paper editions i'd figure over 3000. toured a few used shops and the cheapest stuff was 5.00 for she by haggard. the zorro was 25 and beat up. there was a sherlock holmes, used, nice, 149.

both of my friends in the computer biz keep talking about total cost of ownership so it seems to me if i understand them right these books just made the sony reader the cheapest game in town.

thanks guys, there will be extra doughnuts and karma all around today. summer is in the air and the ac is on high. when twilight comes i'll be at an outdoor coffee house with my sony in one hand, a cigar in the other hand, and a coffee in another hand.

[UncleDuke]

just got back from the bread lines giving out doughnuts and karma, still got a few doughnuts left but the karma ran out, should have some more in stock in a day or so

thanks to all who post, i couldn't do, i'd spend all my time reading and never get anything done

catch you on the flyleaf

[UncleDuke]

i saw one by mencken posted here, how about 'in defense of women' too?

[UncleDuke]

is ellory queen stuff available? sam spade? sure its pulp, but its high quality pulp

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by UncleDuke

is ellory queen stuff available? sam spade? sure its pulp, but its high quality pulp

Not from PG US or PG AU. Sorry.

[godel10]

I’m looking for Euclid's Elements books. Although they are available in gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/21076 , it seems a hard work to convert the book into lrf format (because there are 263 images).

I wonder whether anyone has already done this conversion.

Thanks.