Quote:
Originally Posted by DrMoze
Well, ok, but they really are FREE, as in, they don't cost a penny under the various Sony signup offers. I don't read electronic documents on other devices, so DRM doesn't matter at all.
If all of the Sony Classics are available elsewhere in better format, well, OK. But if some are not, it would be worth dl'ing them from Sony FREE of charge. And some people really don't want to be bothered with converting formats. Really. (The upload forum here *is* a great source for Sony-format books tho. And the SilkPagoda $10 DVD is a great deal for a ton of lrf-format books in decent format.)
But with the Sony offer, the 50 classics are indeed "free."  |
It's so hard to recommend books to someone else who hasn't said what type of reading she prefers (romance, mystery, sci-fi, history, biography, cooking, medical, ancient, 19th-century fiction, American, British, foreign language, etc).
As to the SilkPagoda books, I bought the DVD and find that I'm not overly thrilled with the page layout of the books. I bought it because there are a lot of things there which aren't available at Project Gutenberg (or here). I've gone through it and for those works not available elsewhere I've renamed the files to something meaningful in this format:
authorlastname -- title.lrf example: Twain -- Huckleberry Finn.lrf
so that I can organize them easily and clearly on my computer for moving to the reader when I want.
But for every book which is available at PG, I simply run a special program originally written for making PG books better on the Librie (it removes all the singe hard-returns so the lines flow properly but keeps the double hard-returns for the paragraph separation) and do nothing else. I have no problem reading them at the S font size setting, but they're fine at M and L also for those who need larger fonts. And I don't need tables of contents with links to chapters for those books I read (fiction, mostly mystery) so all the fancying up that people have done on this forum is overkill for my uses.
I have begun to experiment with libprs500 because the book size is smaller, but it gets old having to change the settings for the top, bottom and side margins each time and I haven't found a way to make my settings the default yet, so I haven't done too many that way. I do like how it improves the books, but with many thousands of titles on my computer I don't have the time to convert them all. And then there's the fact that it writes brand new folders each time it saves the book files and resaves the text files, so it is currently more bother than I currently have time for. It is a marvelous program and easier than BookDesigner, although I have begun to investigate that as well but the same time constraints are in place.
So I simply read the PG text files I have massaged as indicated above.
Perhaps you can print out a list of the classics available at the sony Connect site and then compare that list with what's available either here or at PG or on the BlackMask disc (list of books is viewable online) and then download any from the sony site which aren't at the other two sites. And by all means, buy the BlackMask disc!
And for anybody who wants it, the DVD of the PG library as of July of 2007 (first 20,000 books, they claim -- or was it 15,000?) is available for free if you can't download it. I have made a couple of donations to the PG work over the years and encourage others to do the same. They encourage people to make copies of the DVD themselves and forward them to friends. Trying to download the DVD iso files is a real pain and takes a long time.