Quote:
Originally Posted by Sirtel
While it's hard to say if the Kindle edition is legal or not (I agree it looks suspicious), some books are published on Amazon only and may never become available anywhere else. So if you see an ebook on Amazon and nowhere else, get it from Amazon. You can convert it to epub or kepub for your Kobo.
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Actually, it's extremely easy. Download a sample and look at the code. It looks like a text file with some minor HTML added. No stylesheet. No ToC. No way.
Code:
</head><body>
<img src="../images/00001.jpeg"/><h3><b id="2-4075afe7f55f4dc6b79995ce207a6658">Larry Niven</b></h3>
<font size="-2"><i><p>Phssthpok the Pak had been traveling for most of his thirty-two thousand years. His mission:
save, develop, and protect the group of Pak breeders sent out into space some two and a half million
years before…</p>
<p>Brennan was a Belter, the product of a fiercely independent, somewhat anarchic society living in,
on, and around an outer asteroid belt. The Belters were rebels, one and all, and Brennan was a
smuggler. The Belt worlds had been tracking the Pak ship for days — Brennan figured to meet that
ship first…</p>
He was never seen again — at least not by those alive at the time.
<p>The work fleshes out a species called the Pak, originally introduced in a story called Pak
Protectors. The first half of the novel is titled Phssthpok and the second half is titled Vandervecken.
The first half was previously published as The Adults. The novel Destroyer of Worlds will serve as a
semi-sequel to Protector.</p>
Nominated for Hugo and Locus awards in 1974.</i></font>
<h1><b>by Larry Niven
PHSSTHPOK</b></h1>
<i><p>Genesis, Chapter 3, King James version:<br/>
22 And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to
know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the
tree of life, and eat, and live forever:<br/>
23 Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to
till the ground from whence he was taken.<br/>
24 So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the Garden of
Eden Cher-u-bims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep
the way of the tree of life.</p>
<b>***</b></i>
<p>He sat before an eight-foot circle of clear twing, looking endlessly out
on a view that was less than exciting.<br/>
Even a decade ago those stars had been a sprinkling of dull red dots in
his wake. When he cleared the forward view, they would shine a hellish
blue, bright enough to read by. To the side, the biggest had been visibly
flattened. But now there were only stars, white points sparsely scattered
across a sky that was mostly black. This was a lonely sky. Dust clouds hid
the blazing glory of home.<br/>
The light in the center of the view was not a star. It was big as a sun,
dark at the center, and bright enough to have burned holes in a man’s
retinae. It was the light of a Bussard ramjet, burning a bare eight miles
away. Every few years Phssthpok spent some time watching the drive, just
to be sure it was burning evenly. A long time ago he had caught a slow,
periodic wavering in time to prevent his ship from becoming a tiny nova.
But the blue-white light had not changed at all in the weeks he’d been
watching it.<br/>