Google vs. Gutenberg

[neilm2]

I'm a huge fan of the Gutenberg library, but lately I've been playing with an alternative way to read old public domain books on the Sony Reader. I'm converting Google Books scans into .lrf format. What's cool is on your Sony Reader the pages of classic books look just like they would if you checked them out of the local library, complete with old time typography, woodcuts, and scribbles in the margins. How? The conversion method keeps the pages as beautiful scans and stitches them all together into a single lrf book that can be quickly and easilly flipped through on the Sony Reader.

Here's how you do it...

1.) download and install Alex D.'s PDFrasterFarian program...

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=9106

2.) Go to Google Books Advanced Search and look for downloadable "full view" books...

http://books.google.com/advanced_book_search

3.) Download the full .pdf file of a book. The best books to try have largish type and images. A good test book is Aesop's Fables...

http://books.google.com/books?vid=OC...tsec=titlepage

4.) Drag the download .pdf file onto the icon for "PDFrasterFarian.cmd".

5.) Follow the command prompts until the book is fully converted to an .lrf file.

Warning: You should be somewhat tech-savvy and patient to even bother with this. And it probably helps if your idea of fun is converting files and whatnot. If you fit this criteria, by all means have at it. The journey is the reward!

[alex_d]

That's a great use you found for my script. I'd like to point out that the double-res option works best (I finally found a solid use for it), and also manual cropping pays off (the google watermark and image imperfections throw autocropping off a bit). If anyone knows a good cropping tool besides Adobe Acrobat, let us know!

p.s. why do you say to drag the pdf icon to the cmd script? Does the right-click-on-a-pdf work for you?


EDIT: I should mention that Google's PDFs don't work at all on the Reader. Also, I've attached a lrf copy of Aesop's Fables that I manually cropped and trimmed.

[netrider11]

The script also works for pdf with embedded Chinese. The page turning has imporved A LOT, from 20sec to almost instantly. Thank you so much for the script. The file becomes quite big from 1.2MB to ~10MB, but that's okay with my 1G SD card.

Cheers!