Download Hal Spacejock - Free!

[Spacejock]

Originally Posted by redbaron101

just to confim i bought the second book and there are no charges for p&p. Depending on your time zone you might have to wait till its daylight in Oz as they manually email the books to you, and I got mines in word doc format, simple enough to convert to rtf, (although a lot of the users in the bebook forum prefer the mobi format).

It's 7:50 am here in WA and normal office hours are 9-5, so anyone hanging out for their Hal fix shouldn't have much longer to wait ;-)

Cheers
Simon

[snipenekkid]

Originally Posted by Spacejock

They're sending the ebooks in Doc format where the original zip is refused for some reason. Doc seems to have gone through okay, and is easily saved back out to html or rtf. Not ideal, but the important thing is that people aren't kept waiting.

Kinda, well, weird because without thinking I used one of my gmail accounts for the books. But to test it out I sent myself a zipped collection of books I bought at Baen-Webscriptions that was a bit over 2MB in size. There were zero issues. I did not anticipate any as I send and receive files as large as 10-20MB all the time without any issues.

I used a zipped file with books to make sure google was not snooping into the zip file then rejecting books perhaps because of DRM or DCMA issues. But that was obviously not the case as I sent the files from my ISP account to my gmail account using my ISP SMTP server. You know given these are eboks coming from AU. It would sure make me drop gmail and google in a hot second if they indeed were snooping like that though. So if your publisher does find out this is the case, I for one would like to know.

Did anyone figure out why there was a problem with gmail? Were their servers rejecting the mails after a certain number of files sent in an attempt to head of what could be a mail server bombing thing? It is just odd is all. Gmail can be problematic at times, usually when it matters most.

But, not in a hurry for my books, I have a few hundred others to keep me busy. And since I read a lot slower on my PDA I am sure there is plenty of time. I decided to re-read a few of my favorite John Grimes series by A. Bertram Chandler for fun.

[Spacejock]

Originally Posted by snipenekkid

Did anyone figure out why there was a problem with gmail? Were their servers rejecting the mails after a certain number of files sent in an attempt to head of what could be a mail server bombing thing? It is just odd is all. Gmail can be problematic at times, usually when it matters most.

A couple of people downloaded book 1 from the publisher's website (rather than mine), and reported the zip was corrupted. If the zips going out are considered corrupted by gmail then they'll be rejected. That doesn't explain why only a handful out of all the ebooks sent out were corrupted - not when the publisher is sending the same file each time!

[ErwinOtten]

Found my three books in my mailbox yesterday, fast delivery

Too bad neither Mobipocket-creator nor the Mobiperl-tools from Tompe (found in this forum) could make anything useful out of the HTML-file.
It crashes the mobipocket-reader (both on my Cybook and on my PC) in plain HTML as well as converted to mobi.

Maybe I'll try to save the RTF-file as a .DOC and the import it into mobipocket-creator. Otherwise I'll have to do with plain text on my cybook

[pdurrant]

I did a conversion to Mobipocket by stripping out all the junk in the HTML. Simon has these copies now, so hopefully it won't be too long until the publisher is able to distribute them.

Originally Posted by ErwinOtten

Found my three books in my mailbox yesterday, fast delivery

Too bad neither Mobipocket-creator nor the Mobiperl-tools from Tompe (found in this forum) could make anything useful out of the HTML-file.
It crashes the mobipocket-reader (both on my Cybook and on my PC) in plain HTML as well as converted to mobi.

Maybe I'll try to save the RTF-file as a .DOC and the import it into mobipocket-creator. Otherwise I'll have to do with plain text on my cybook

[ErwinOtten]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

I did a conversion to Mobipocket by stripping out all the junk in the HTML. Simon has these copies now, so hopefully it won't be too long until the publisher is able to distribute them.

I tried to save the RFT-file as a .DOC file (first open it with word of course) and then convert if through mobipocket creator. That went remarkably well.
So everybody with a Cybook (or another mobi-reader), you can make a fine .mobi version using the RTF-file. No need to manually strip the HTML-file.



So Paul, your offer is still much appreciated but not that urgent anymore

[Spacejock]

That was the idea with providing plain text, rtf and html. From those three people can generate their own ebook in any format. (The Html is optimised for display purposes in a browser, not for conversion.)

[snipenekkid]

I wanted to let you know that Cathy was very helpful and really worked at trying to email the books. I had not remembered my ISP switched over to Gmail last year sometime so the email to my ISP address bounced. So she used a third option of one of my email servers out there in the ether.

I have yet to do the conversion thought...but cripes for less than US$10 for three books, I would read plain text. Ok, maybe not, still thanks to you and your publisher for such a nice deal!

I will say it has to be something between Fremantle's mail server and Gmail because I can email zipped ebooks just fine from several of my mail servers to my Gmail addresses.

[snipenekkid]

Originally Posted by Spacejock

A couple of people downloaded book 1 from the publisher's website (rather than mine), and reported the zip was corrupted. If the zips going out are considered corrupted by gmail then they'll be rejected. That doesn't explain why only a handful out of all the ebooks sent out were corrupted - not when the publisher is sending the same file each time!

ahhhhhh...that could make a lot of sense. If Gmail cannot do a bit of snooping to make sure nothing harmful is being passed along I could see them rejecting the attachments. Still, I am not thrilled with them not providing a better response back.

Do you think it's possible there exists a couple versions of the zipped file on your publisher's system? I've seen that before for clients where a staff member was claiming they were sending the correct file but it kept having problems. It turned out both times that the person who created the file ran into an error then created a second file which somehow got stuffed into a different directory. The staff person was trying to work with the first file that had the errors.

Hope it all gets sorted out soon.

[redbaron101]

Originally Posted by snipenekkid

ahhhhhh...that could make a lot of sense. If Gmail cannot do a bit of snooping to make sure nothing harmful is being passed along I could see them rejecting the attachments.

not sure that's quite the case with gmail - I have been using gmail for years renaming a lot of my files to end in .blah, when I send .exe files and other stuff to myself (convenient way of working between the office and home). This of course passes through gmail with no problems (as it does with the majority of email servers who try to block certain attachments).

I've asked Cathy to email the zip to my work email address since she has asked for an alternative email address, so when it arrives I can try emailing this back to my gmail account to test the zip file.

[snipenekkid]

Originally Posted by redbaron101

not sure that's quite the case with gmail - I have been using gmail for years renaming a lot of my files to end in .blah, when I send .exe files and other stuff to myself (convenient way of working between the office and home). This of course passes through gmail with no problems (as it does with the majority of email servers who try to block certain attachments).

I've asked Cathy to email the zip to my work email address since she has asked for an alternative email address, so when it arrives I can try emailing this back to my gmail account to test the zip file.

Geeze apparently Jobs was correct, people do not read anymore? All I wrote was that it was a potentially reasonable reason not that is HAD to be that reason.

I use Gmail for all my personal email everything else comes and goes via my own company's email servers and never have problems with either. Still Gmail does do some strange things now and then.

I tested sending zips and other files idea w/o issue. Only if you get the corrupted zip file will such a "test" be of any help. Of course you could just create a zip file of your own, edit it by deleting a portion of say the header and email the corrupted zip file. Eventually, there does come a point where it is the responsibility of Fremantle to solve this issue on their own. That is why they make the money. I would imagine that someone has contacted Gmail or Google to find out what is happening.

I did a quick check to see if Fremantle's email server was blacklisted on a number of SPAM tracking services and found only a single entry on a minor service which should not be the issue. And I also imagine Gmail uses an internal blacklist which is not to be viewed by the public. Plus if the Fremantle mail server was on a blacklist they could not send anything to Gmail addresses. So that was a dead end from the start.

Interesting to see what your results are. Sure is a strange one that is for sure.

[DixieGal]

Originally Posted by Spacejock

That was the idea with providing plain text, rtf and html. From those three people can generate their own ebook in any format. (The Html is optimised for display purposes in a browser, not for conversion.)

It worked like a charm! I took the RTF (I LOVE RTF!!) and fixed it up with nice big fonts and wider line spacing, 0.5 margins, and converted to PDF. I can actually read it on my Sony in the upright portrait format, which is much more comfy than landscape.

You know Book 1 is in our uploads section, right? I read it and loved it a year ago, had no idea there were other books in the series.

[Spacejock]

Originally Posted by DixieGal

It worked like a charm! I took the RTF (I LOVE RTF!!) and fixed it up with nice big fonts and wider line spacing, 0.5 margins, and converted to PDF. I can actually read it on my Sony in the upright portrait format, which is much more comfy than landscape.

You know Book 1 is in our uploads section, right? I read it and loved it a year ago, had no idea there were other books in the series.

If in doubt, you can always check the website ;-)

http://www.spacejock.com.au/

[columbus]

Originally Posted by Spacejock;

EDIT because the thread is getting so long: Hal Spacejock ebooks 2-4 are now available to purchase from the publisher at under US$3.50 each (DRM-free format). Full details and links here: http://www.spacejock.com.au/HalSpacejockEbooks.html
Simon

Thanks very much for the freebie, enjoyable read once I got into it. Have just ordered the next 3.

Great marketing exercise I hope other publishers follow this. It is much better than a free first chapter, I rarely buy the book from that.

Thanks again

[Stormchild]

Simon. I wonder if you can update us on the success (or not) of this. I hope it is going well.

I am halfway through book 4 and they are all as brilliant as the 1st book. I suppose I am going to have to wait ages for book 5.