MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Read e-books through RSS feeds

Alexander Turcic · 01-04-2005, 01:32 PM

Russell Beattie added a nifty new feature to his Mobdex ('Content for Mobiles') - project. You can now have small chunks of an e-book delivered to you daily via RSS feed. In other words, we don't accept any more excuses ('lack of time') for not having read classics such as H.G. Wells' The Time Machine. How-to-use, taken from Russell's blog:

Simply find a book, note it's ID number, then subscribe to the RSS feed like this:

http://www.mobdex.com/rss?book=116&id=russ

The ID can be anything, but because I'm not checking for duplicates or want to deal with a registration process, it's better to use something unique like your email or something secret yet unique. This RSS will return the first "page" of text in that book to your RSS aggregator. If the first few pages are gobbledygook (as Project Gutenberg books sometimes are) or you want to go back a few "pages", simply reset the counter (which increments +1 "page" per day you've checked the site) by appending a "page" parameter like "&page=12".

And if you're a speed reader and want the pages to be updated more frequently, add an "interval" parameter in minutes. This would produce another page for my aggregator every couple of hours:

http://www.mobdex.com/rss?book=116&id=russ&interval=120

And what is Mobdex?
Mobdex contains several hundred public domain e-books from Project Gutenberg, dynamically reformatted to be readable on the web and modern mobile browsers.

01-04-2005, 01:32 PM	#1
Alexander Turcic Fully Converged Posts: 18,175 Karma: 14021202 Join Date: Oct 2002 Location: Switzerland Device: Too many to count here.	Read e-books through RSS feeds Russell Beattie added a nifty new feature to his Mobdex ('Content for Mobiles') - project. You can now have small chunks of an e-book delivered to you daily via RSS feed. In other words, we don't accept any more excuses ('lack of time') for not having read classics such as H.G. Wells' The Time Machine. How-to-use, taken from Russell's blog: Simply find a book, note it's ID number, then subscribe to the RSS feed like this: http://www.mobdex.com/rss?book=116&id=russ The ID can be anything, but because I'm not checking for duplicates or want to deal with a registration process, it's better to use something unique like your email or something secret yet unique. This RSS will return the first "page" of text in that book to your RSS aggregator. If the first few pages are gobbledygook (as Project Gutenberg books sometimes are) or you want to go back a few "pages", simply reset the counter (which increments +1 "page" per day you've checked the site) by appending a "page" parameter like "&page=12". And if you're a speed reader and want the pages to be updated more frequently, add an "interval" parameter in minutes. This would produce another page for my aggregator every couple of hours: http://www.mobdex.com/rss?book=116&id=russ&interval=120 And what is Mobdex? Mobdex contains several hundred public domain e-books from Project Gutenberg, dynamically reformatted to be readable on the web and modern mobile browsers.