But what about Content?

[scstraus]

No one seems to be mentioning the problem of finding content. I'd imagine if you are satisfied with reading project gutenberg docs, random pdf's or html you find on the web it's fine, but what if you want new books and magazines?

Has anyone found any good solutions for getting current bestselling books or magazines onto this thing? Unfortunately all the e-magazine and e-book formats seem to be proprietary with DRM. I wish we could have a Zinio Reader, Microsoft Reader, Mobipocket, etc for this, then it would really be useful.

Where are you guys getting real (current) books and magazines to read?

[scotty1024]

Over in the iRex forums they have stated that neither Adobe, Microsoft or Amazon has been responding positively for the past year to their attempts to get a license for DRM to their respective platforms.

Can these platforms be broken? Of course.

Is doing so legal? Depends upon local laws. In the US it is illegal to circumvent a copy protection mechanism for pretty much any reason at all, including "fair use".

Best to consult with the attorney you would be paying to keep you out of jail before breaking any DRM mechanisms to gain access to content for your iLiad.

[DHer]

Well, there are some newspapers offering epaper versions of their magazines. The greatest example i found to date is the german taz with their html version.

Another way is the legal circumvention mechanism using a pdf printer of some sort. (Ok, i'm not a lawyer, but but something you can circumvent this way can't be called "working copy protection")

Yet another way are some libraries which offer to send you scans of magazines - if, and for which price they can do it, depends on the library and your relation to it.

And last but not least you can lobby, like i do at the moment, your favourite news and book producers to offer "iliad-friendly" content - even if i don't see a fast success yet.

[rlauzon]

Originally Posted by scstraus

No one seems to be mentioning the problem of finding content.

That's because we aren't having problem finding content. Right now, I have over 530MB of unread eBooks (mostly in text format). Plus another 130MB that I've already read.

I've collected these eBooks from Gutenberg, Blackmask (when it was up), Usenet eBook newsgroups and others.

Newer content comes from Fictionwise, Creative Common and misc other places like Baen. Right now I am reading Baen Universe #1 - a collection of short stories from Baen Books.

Originally Posted by scstraus

I'd imagine if you are satisfied with reading project gutenberg docs, random pdf's or html you find on the web it's fine, but what if you want new books and magazines?

Creative Commons. A link to a free book on London ambulence services was just posted here at MobileRead.

FictionWise. Lots of good stuff, all for pay, but reasonable prices for non-DRM stuff.

Unfortunately, it looks like Blackmask is still off-line.

Originally Posted by scstraus

Has anyone found any good solutions for getting current bestselling books or magazines onto this thing?

IHMO. "Best selling" = "most hyped" and not necessairly = "good".
Really, I could care less about most "best sellers". The truely good stuff ends up scanned and posted to Usenet. I just go out and purchase the paper edition too to make sure that the author is compensated. (I wish I could just send the author the money for the book directly, then he'll get more than $0.70 for that book.)

Also, I found that many books that I eschewed as a teen are really good and in the public domain today, so Gutenberg is nothing to sneeze at.

Originally Posted by scstraus

Unfortunately all the e-magazine and e-book formats seem to be proprietary with DRM.

Yup. And the best way to fix that is to hit them hard where it hurts: their wallets. Don't buy DRM and sooner or later, DRM will go away (or at least be made non-painful).

Originally Posted by scstraus

I wish we could have a Zinio Reader, Microsoft Reader, Mobipocket, etc for this, then it would really be useful.

I don't. These readers are closed, proprietary solutions. The purpose of such solutions is to lock users into a particular company and make it painful and/or expensive to go somewhere else.

INMO: anyone who made an investment in any of these readers is foolish. And you know what they say about a "fool and his money"... Sorry if that offends anyone, but if you payed money for anything that has DRM on it, you did not buy it - you rented it. And they never guaranteed you the right to use that content outside of their control.

[vranghel]

Here are some sources of free ebooks

http://www.digitalbookindex.org/search001a.htm tons of books from many libraries and online archives

www.bookshub.org/ lots of IT and business books

www.bartleby.com/

www.arthurwendover.com/

www.textfiles.com

www.ibiblio.org/

www.netlibrary.com/

www.memoware.com

www.blackmask.com

www.manybooks.net/ SUPPORTS iLIAD

http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/



Hope you find what interests you

Enjoy!

[rlauzon]

Originally Posted by vranghel

http://www.digitalbookindex.org/search001a.htm

Interesting site. However it's a bit overwhelming. You need to have a fair idea of what you want before trying this site.

If you are "looking for a good book", this site won't help much. But if you are "looking for a book by <author> or a book on <subject>", this is probably the place to go.

Originally Posted by vranghel

www.bookshub.org/

Yes, but their content seems to be all PDF.

PDF is not an eBook format. It's a page layout format. Since most books are not iLiad-sized, the odds that you will find a PDF here that is readable on the iLiad is very low.

Originally Posted by vranghel

www.bartleby.com/

Project Gutenberg clone. Not to say that they don't have good stuff, though.
Unfortunately, the content seems to be arranged to be read online. Not on an eBook reader (i.e. multiple chapters = multiple HTML files).

Originally Posted by vranghel

www.arthurwendover.com/

A little better than barleby.com in that an ebook is 1 big HTML page, making conversion to the iLiad easier.

Originally Posted by vranghel

www.textfiles.com

Not really an eBook site. Lots of old text files from the BBS days. Some of it still pretty good.

Originally Posted by vranghel

www.ibiblio.org/

I've been here alot. Good stuff. But mostly esoteric content.

Originally Posted by vranghel

www.netlibrary.com/

You need to sign up for a "free" account (i.e. provide personal information) and I don't see any reasonably-priced eBooks. Everything I see is priced far above print costs.

Online use only (i.e. don't think about reading it on your iLiad) for many titles.

Originally Posted by vranghel

www.memoware.com

Lots of content, none of it read for the iLiad and many of it in proprietary formats. I used to check this place out daily, but the open/proprietary ratio was getting mighty small, so I stopped.

Originally Posted by vranghel

www.blackmask.com

Still down.

Originally Posted by vranghel

www.manybooks.net/

Yes, very nice. Depending on what you like, this may be the best of the bunch.

Originally Posted by vranghel

http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/

Like bartleby.com, they seem to require you to read online, making it not a very good choice for iLiad content.

[scotty1024]

Originally Posted by scstraus

Has anyone found any good solutions for getting current bestselling books or magazines onto this thing? Unfortunately all the e-magazine and e-book formats seem to be proprietary with DRM. I wish we could have a Zinio Reader, Microsoft Reader, Mobipocket, etc for this, then it would really be useful.

All those postings are wonderful stuff, but the original thread point is quoted above. He's not looking for free, he's looking to get current hot sell content.

[k2r]

Basically the publishers repeat the mp3-story.
They refuse to sell their content to us because they want extreme Digital Restrictions Management.
The illegal distribution of copyrighted content grows without them.
Then there will be another Steve Jobs and the publishing world as we knew it will be history.

[Calabahn]

Originally Posted by scotty1024

Best to consult with the attorney you would be paying to keep you out of jail before breaking any DRM mechanisms to gain access to content for your iLiad.

Oh come on, jail? Get real. Unless your bragging about circumventing DRM, hosting hacked content and or hosting how to documents/software. Your chances of being noticed to the point in which a barristers services are required are slim to none.

[Calabahn]

Duplicate post, sorry.

[kusmi]

What about this idea (I guess a lot of people already doing it like this?): You just buy your DRM stuff (e.g. DRM-PDFs) and display it on the computer-screen, then you just need an automated "screen-capture" program which presses the next-page button, capture part of the screen, presses the next-page button, ... at the end you have many pictures which you could then convert into a pdf consisting of those images, of course you don't have the real text, but it should be readable on the iLiad with no problems?

I guess developing such an application, to do all this would not be that difficult? (except e.g. Adobe prevents to make screenshots of it's DRM content..., like on many DVD player...)

[ath]

Originally Posted by rlauzon

... Apropos http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/

Like bartleby.com, they seem to require you to read online, making it not a very good choice for iLiad content.

Not quite: This site is an index site, a catalogue site, that collects, classifies and organizes links to material available elsewhere, including bartleby, gutenberg, and many other places.

[scstraus]

Thanks for the links to the free content, that's a good comprehensive start!

Originally Posted by scotty1024

All those postings are wonderful stuff, but the original thread point is quoted above. He's not looking for free, he's looking to get current hot sell content.

That's true. Not to sneeze at the 100 year old classics, but I'm more of a modern man. I mainly stick to sci-fi and magazines. Certainly if my tastes ran more in the vane of what's on Gutenberg, I wouldn't be worrying about it.

As it is, it sounds like it's more as I expected, a DIY affair. Which isn't necessarily a deal breaker as long as there are some ways to get content that I like onto it. I don't even mind buying the content I have to convert from mobipocket or whoever. (Although I live in eastern europe and don't have much fear of the DRM Gestopo or need to consult my lawyer every time I click a link on my computer ).

So if I get content in mobipocket I can print it and use a print-to-pdf conduit? I would imagine most readers don't support printing...?

Originally Posted by ksumi

What about this idea (I guess a lot of people already doing it like this?): You just buy your DRM stuff (e.g. DRM-PDFs) and display it on the computer-screen, then you just need an automated "screen-capture" program which presses the next-page button, capture part of the screen, presses the next-page button, ... at the end you have many pictures which you could then convert into a pdf consisting of those images, of course you don't have the real text, but it should be readable on the iLiad with no problems?

Something like that would be nice, it would be a lot more universal than the other solutions which seem like a mishmash of various cracks and workarounds and web sites I'll have to learn. I just want to read a book I like, you know? I don't necessarily want to take up a new form of contect cracking.

[kusmi]

I quickly did a small script (mac only, sorry...) to capture all pages of a pdf and stores the pictures as png on disk:

set locationToSave to (choose folder with prompt "Choose where to save the screenshots")
set NEXTARROW to ASCII character of 29
tell application "System Events"
tell application "Adobe Reader 7.0.5" to activate
set frontmost to true
keystroke "l" using command down
delay 4
repeat with counter from 1 to 10000
delay 1
do shell script "screencapture '" & POSIX path of locationToSave & "/screen" & (text -5 thru -1 of ("00000" & counter)) & ".png'"
keystroke NEXTARROW
set result to (name of processes) contains "Adobe Reader"
if not (result) then
exit repeat
end if
end repeat
keystroke "l" using command down
end tell

All you have to do, is to open Adobe reader, and open the pdf you want and select the first page. Then run this script:

1. It will ask for a directory where to store all pictures
2. It will then swap Adobe Reader into full-screen mode
3. And then iterates over all pages and does screen-shots, one page after the other with a 1 sec delay (depending on CPU of machine and complexity of PDF, the Adobe Reader needs max approx 1 second to display correctly...)

The current limitation is, that this script will not automatically stop at the end , so to stop capturing, you manually have to quit Adobe Reader (command-q) then the script will stop.

After that you can load all pictures into Combine PDF (a free software to combine PDFs, but it also can combine pictures and stores them as PDF). Of course you could also first pre-process the images and remove the black border around every image (e.g. with GraphicConverter) or you can just crop the resulting PDF at the end.

Please note, this script should not be used for illegal activities, it's just meant for DRM-pdfs you own, therefore I guess it would be illegal to distribute the produced PDFs. In any case, the resulting PDF are just "pictures", so it's a bit the same as I would go to the library and photo-copy a book (which is legal, at least here in my country...)

[DHer]

Btw: who of you would like to join me on the "Frankfurter Buchmesse" and showcase the iliad a little bit to publishers?

You know, like go there, show them the device, show them some great content well formated and ask them if you could get their books in the same format?