Quote:
Originally Posted by monkius
I have been getting a lot of books from baen.com from their free library as well as some you can purchase and download.
Pros:
- All of the files are available without DRM.
Cons:
- I have to use some perl scripts to bump up the font size on the rtf files and have to manually add the author / title information so the Reader can see it.
For me, getting the book without DRM is the biggest issue. It is not that I want to pirate the books, but rather I want to be able to read the books I purchase for years to come. While the Reader is good now, I want my library to transfer to whatever electronic book I use in the future.
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html2lrf (part of libprs500) handles Baen books really really well. The trick is to give the *_toc.htm file as the root for conversion. I use the following switches:
Code:
-o "$title".lrf --cover="$cover" "./$ISBN"_toc.htm --font-delta=-1 --disable-chapter-detection --baen
where $title is the book's title, $cover is the isbn.jpg file, "./$ISBN"_toc.htm is the table of contents file. The --baen switch cleans up a few unfortunate things in the html before converting.
I've chosen --font-delta=-1 so that the S size works for me in landscape mode, and the M size works for me in portrait mode. Your mileage may vary.
Give it a try -- I've found the converted .lrf files are much more convenient than the rtf files are. Especially for collections, where the table of contents links matter.
Edit-- The other thing is that all the html versions of stuff from Baen are extremely stylized. This makes it easy to write a script that does right by any Baen html book, complete with extracting title and author meta-data, getting the cover art, and so on.
I note that I've converted everything from Baen into lrf files with this technique. At this point my scripts are set up well enough that when Kovid fixes bugs in html2lrf, it's a one line command to re-convert all those hundreds of books and stick the .lrf files in the right places on my disk.