list of best free Books??? please share!

[nekokami]

Originally Posted by pilotbob

What is Noir? I see several referring to that Genre/Category and I've never heard of it? Google doesn't seem to give me any help.

Kinda what Goth and Emo want to be when they grow up.

(Though I freely admit that such a definition may not be much help... depending on how familiar you are with contemporary teen slang.)

[cmbs]

Thanks for the answers!

DixieGal - Thank you, good to know.

Pshrynk - You have to assess each site for yourself and decide if they are legal or not. I do try to be sure they're all legal. They all look fine to me or I wouldn't link to them. But I give you the sites to assess for yourself. One thing - a lot of illegal download sites have copyright statements as if they're legit and I have known people fooled by them. A statement of copyright is not assurance that a site is offering legal downloads. So you have to have some idea of what you're looking for - who has the right to distribute the book?

desertgrandma - "I repeat, EVERY book download has this caution before the link." Every book? Every single book? What are you talking about? Why are you paranoid? My agenda was to ask about how you know a download site is legal, particularly in light of the fact that copyright notices may be bogus, and if a person cares one way or the other. And to hopefully get some real responses. In other words - lose the dust colored glasses and read what it says. It's not complicated.

UncleDuke - What are you talking about? You don't make a lot of sense.

[UncleDuke]

Originally Posted by cmbs

Thanks for the answers!

DixieGal - Thank you, good to know.

Pshrynk - You have to assess each site for yourself and decide if they are legal or not. I do try to be sure they're all legal. They all look fine to me or I wouldn't link to them. But I give you the sites to assess for yourself. One thing - a lot of illegal download sites have copyright statements as if they're legit and I have known people fooled by them. A statement of copyright is not assurance that a site is offering legal downloads. So you have to have some idea of what you're looking for - who has the right to distribute the book?

desertgrandma - "I repeat, EVERY book download has this caution before the link." Every book? Every single book? What are you talking about? Why are you paranoid? My agenda was to ask about how you know a download site is legal, particularly in light of the fact that copyright notices may be bogus, and if a person cares one way or the other. And to hopefully get some real responses. In other words - lose the dust colored glasses and read what it says. It's not complicated.

UncleDuke - What are you talking about? You don't make a lot of sense.

well then that would make two of us wouldn't it?

at least i don't tease and lash back when someone calls my number

i feel so much safer now that i know your rules of safe surfing, almost like a having a full body condom for e=books

[Patricia]

Originally Posted by cmbs

UncleDuke - What are you talking about? You don't make a lot of sense.

My understanding is that UncleDuke reports that he posted on your blog, and included a link for the get a free BeBook offer - the same link that you are using on this site - and that you censored his post by removing the link.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by cmbs

Patricia - I confess to being puzzled as to how you can claim to hand format 10 books every day. Even the easiest books take me a day to hand format, then several days reading to check for errors. Seems we just don't understand each other very well. I suspect our definition of "hand formatting" differs.

I have no idea how Patricia hand formats her books; I do know that when I have time for it (i.e. not on weekdays), in one day I can format several novel-length works to PDF layout of my choice, or PRC for ereader. Working from FineReader exports takes a bit longer, because FR does some odd things with formatting (it's prone to creating text boxes instead of inline text), but I could still do a small handful in a day, including checking the OCR against the scanned tifs.

Macros help, and knowing find/replace tricks that work, and styles, and having a single layout goal, and practice with similar works. Anything you do a hundred times gets smoother; you notice potential slowdowns early, and develop ways to work around some of them. Good software helps. Good hardware helps--a desk at the right height so your back doesn't get sore after the first hour, a mouse at the right angle so your wrist doesn't hurt, and so on.

Ten a day doesn't sound at all extreme for someone who's both talented and experienced at ebook conversion. Presumably, textbooks or books with lots of diagrams or links or odd formatting would take a bit longer--but even those can have streamlined processes, if one deals with enough of them.

[Patricia]

And none of us convert ten individual titles each day. Many of us upload one book in several formats.

[cmbs]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

I have no idea how Patricia hand formats her books; I do know that when I have time for it (i.e. not on weekdays), in one day I can format several novel-length works to PDF layout of my choice, or PRC for ereader. Working from FineReader exports takes a bit longer, because FR does some odd things with formatting (it's prone to creating text boxes instead of inline text), but I could still do a small handful in a day, including checking the OCR against the scanned tifs.

Macros help, and knowing find/replace tricks that work, and styles, and having a single layout goal, and practice with similar works. Anything you do a hundred times gets smoother; you notice potential slowdowns early, and develop ways to work around some of them. Good software helps. Good hardware helps--a desk at the right height so your back doesn't get sore after the first hour, a mouse at the right angle so your wrist doesn't hurt, and so on.

Ten a day doesn't sound at all extreme for someone who's both talented and experienced at ebook conversion. Presumably, textbooks or books with lots of diagrams or links or odd formatting would take a bit longer--but even those can have streamlined processes, if one deals with enough of them.

As I said, I suspect we have a different definition of hand formatting. You can run ten books a day through software and spit out the results and post them online. You can even call it hand formatting. I don't call that hand formatting. It is of course no different from what Manybooks.net does, only they have over 23,000 separate books in a lot of file types. That's different file types for each and every book counting as one book. And their mobi files (which is what I read) don't have pre-determined settings which deprive me of choosing my own.

It's not humanly possible to hand format ten books per day if you're actually hand formatting them. Which involves reading them, selectively formatting the text, creating one or more tables of contents, possibly linking to and from footnotes, reading the book and checking for and fixing errors.

[cmbs]

Originally Posted by Patricia

My understanding is that UncleDuke reports that he posted on your blog, and included a link for the get a free BeBook offer - the same link that you are using on this site - and that you censored his post by removing the link.

Well ouch, you really got me this time.

When my blog has a post inviting people to leave their email addresses for the BeBook offer, he'll be welcome to do that.

I didn't remove the link, I rejected his inappropriate comment entirely.

What exactly is your point? Or were you just sharing because you thought it was so interesting? I reject all inappropriate comments, that is why I moderate comments. Seriously, is that what you want to discuss? Because it'd be impossible for you to either give a real answer to my original comment or just leave me alone, right?

[zelda_pinwheel]

completely apart from the question of respecting copyright on whose importance you're insisting -- and you are right about that -- i don't see in what way the fact that several different sites exist offering free public domain books to download would diminish the offerings of any one of those sites, which is what you seem to be implying, nor do i see why we shouldn't appreciate the people who do the admittedly intensive and sometimes tedious work of formatting them for us in an attractive way to enhance the reading experience. manybooks uses automated programs for this, mobileread members each have their own workflow which is more individual, but all of these contributions are valuable to our collective culture and should be appreciated rather than denigrated.

[pshrynk]

Originally Posted by cmbs

Well ouch, you really got me this time.

When my blog has a post inviting people to leave their email addresses for the BeBook offer, he'll be welcome to do that.

I didn't remove the link, I rejected his inappropriate comment entirely.

What exactly is your point? Or were you just sharing because you thought it was so interesting? I reject all inapropriate comments, that is why I moderate comments. Seriously, is that what you want to discuss? Because it'd be impossible for you to either give a real answer to my original comment or just leave me alone, right?

What was the original comment? I can't seem to get a handle on where, exactly your concern lies.

[krisk]

Originally Posted by cmbs

Well ouch, you really got me this time.

When my blog has a post inviting people to leave their email addresses for the BeBook offer, he'll be welcome to do that.

I didn't remove the link, I rejected his inappropriate comment entirely.

What exactly is your point? Or were you just sharing because you thought it was so interesting? I reject all inapropriate comments, that is why I moderate comments. Seriously, is that what you want to discuss? Because it'd be impossible for you to either give a real answer to my original comment or just leave me alone, right?

Oh Oh Oh!!! I know what would be fun! Why don't we all go ask the same question over and over again at her blog!

[RWood]

Originally Posted by pshrynk

What was the original comment? I can't seem to get a handle on where, exactly your concern lies.

You did not miss much pshrynk. Even when given an answer if it was not one cmbs wanted, she dismissed it as being off-point of failing to understand her unique insight on the issue. Only those responses that agreed with her secret agenda were deemed appropriate.

As one who has posted 10 books in one day (and each of them in multiple formats) on the MobileRead site, it was the end product of a long workflow involving many tools over a period. I did not start and finish ten books in one day resulting in thirty postings.

There is a major difference between preparing a text for publication and creating that text originally. I realize that this is covering old ground for you; but there are other readers out there that may find this interesting. The time spent in preparation has a direct relationship to the quality of the base text. While it is true that many high quality texts are available fro Project Gutenberg, many of their texts also require extensive editing. (As an aside, HarryT has made thousands of corrections to some of the Dickens’ novels. That’s thousands per book, not for the series.)

Many of their common problems are simple to repair – such as a paragraph break in the middle of a sentence. Often there are the remaining artifacts of OCR scanning such as a “c” where an “e” should be. Other times there will be the one word used where another was intended such as where/wear, to/too/two, or clog/dog. Some sources are edited to remove “objectionable” material such as some of the sources Patricia encountered and reinserted the original form of the book before posting at MobileRead.

Sometimes you work with your own scans or scans from sources such as the Internet Archive. In those cases, I have performed the OCR, cleaned the text and then formatted. For example, several volumes of the Harvard Classics and Augustine’s City of God were prepared that way.

Once the text is in shape for publication it still needs to be formatted for the eBook of choice. In all eBook preparation tools that I have used, you have to identify the meta data, chapter titles, italics, and any other special formatting. Depending upon the tool, what will be the base font and size, will the book title be on every page, how do you handle the chapter title, is “AE” one or two characters in the base font encoding, it there a unique title page, and where do you force a page break? In addition, many books have graphics that must be added back at the right place, and-- in many that I have prepared—the MobileRead logo added for identification. Linking footnotes to the text can sometimes take many days.

A while ago as an experiment, a few of us took the same base text from Project Gutenberg and produced books in our own way. The results varied widely since each of us have our own style. I felt that all were superior to the automated, mechanical translations performed by manybooks.net. If absolute large numbers of eBooks available at MobileRead were our goal, this could be achieved in a matter of days. Fortunately, this is not our goal. The books offered here are “value added” through more proofing and better formatting to name two.

[NatCh]

Originally Posted by pshrynk

What was the original comment? I can't seem to get a handle on where, exactly your concern lies.

After much consideration, I think cmbs actually meant to pose some general questions about sites that host free content, presumably to start a discussion of them.

Putting the original questions in a list form, with minor text adjustments to accommodate that format a bit better:

• If a blog [or other website], which is not affiliated with a legitimate bookseller, is hosting and giving away hundreds of free ebooks they did not create (and therefore [presumably] don't own a copyright to), how [can you tell if] the downloads are legal?
• Because they say so?
• Where [do] they get legal rights to distribute the books?
• [Do] you care if [that] download is legal or not?

As I said originally, they're good points to consider -- probably worthy of their own thread, but since we've never been terribly fussy around here about threads taking new directions on their own, there's no need to start a new one at this point.

[Sparrow]

Originally Posted by krisk

Oh Oh Oh!!! I know what would be fun! Why don't we all go ask the same question over and over again at her blog!

Certainly makes one appreciate the generally polite and respectful tone of most MR posters.

I find myself taking that for granted sometimes.

[cmbs]

Originally Posted by RWood

You did not miss much pshrynk. Even when given an answer if it was not one cmbs wanted, she dismissed it as being off-point of failing to understand her unique insight on the issue. Only those responses that agreed with her secret agenda were deemed appropriate.

As one who has posted 10 books in one day (and each of them in multiple formats) on the MobileRead site, it was the end product of a long workflow involving many tools over a period. I did not start and finish ten books in one day resulting in thirty postings.

There is a major difference between preparing a text for publication and creating that text originally. I realize that this is covering old ground for you; but there are other readers out there that may find this interesting. The time spent in preparation has a direct relationship to the quality of the base text. While it is true that many high quality texts are available fro Project Gutenberg, many of their texts also require extensive editing. (As an aside, HarryT has made thousands of corrections to some of the Dickens’ novels. That’s thousands per book, not for the series.)

Many of their common problems are simple to repair – such as a paragraph break in the middle of a sentence. Often there are the remaining artifacts of OCR scanning such as a “c” where an “e” should be. Other times there will be the one word used where another was intended such as where/wear, to/too/two, or clog/dog. Some sources are edited to remove “objectionable” material such as some of the sources Patricia encountered and reinserted the original form of the book before posting at MobileRead.

Sometimes you work with your own scans or scans from sources such as the Internet Archive. In those cases, I have performed the OCR, cleaned the text and then formatted. For example, several volumes of the Harvard Classics and Augustine’s City of God were prepared that way.

Once the text is in shape for publication it still needs to be formatted for the eBook of choice. In all eBook preparation tools that I have used, you have to identify the meta data, chapter titles, italics, and any other special formatting. Depending upon the tool, what will be the base font and size, will the book title be on every page, how do you handle the chapter title, is “AE” one or two characters in the base font encoding, it there a unique title page, and where do you force a page break? In addition, many books have graphics that must be added back at the right place, and-- in many that I have prepared—the MobileRead logo added for identification. Linking footnotes to the text can sometimes take many days.

A while ago as an experiment, a few of us took the same base text from Project Gutenberg and produced books in our own way. The results varied widely since each of us have our own style. I felt that all were superior to the automated, mechanical translations performed by manybooks.net. If absolute large numbers of eBooks available at MobileRead were our goal, this could be achieved in a matter of days. Fortunately, this is not our goal. The books offered here are “value added” through more proofing and better formatting to name two.

I've seen some of your books on this website. Do you check them before posting? I've found footnotes with no links so the reader has no idea they're there. I've found links that go on for pages and pages. I've found tables that are spread out all over the place - neither formatted as tables nor formatted as readable text. Seems anyone taking care to do a good job and checking their work before posting would have caught and corrected these things.

And I don't have a secret agenda. It's only secret to those of you who read my comments looking for something that isn't there. You completely miss what I actually said.

If a reply is completely off point of what I said, yes I call it off point. This is also not complicated nor secret.