Connect Classics Recommendations?

[Andanzas]

This is a random page from the version I downloaded from Connect of A Midsummer Night's Dream.



1. It is verse, no prose.
2. Hermya is not really speaking in her second intervention.
3. The formatting is not consistent (notice how there is no new paragraph after Theseus).
4. ...

I also downloaded several books of poems and they are annoyingly double spaced:

[JSWolf]

Looks like they just took the file, tossed it into some program and saved as LRX and let if go. That's really bad formatting.

[edbro]

I think you will find a lot of the classics right here on this site for free. The advantage of the free ones is that you don't have to mess with DRM issues.

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by ns66

Hi I have 2 ereaders got 150 classic books to order, what a pita

I don't know much about classic books, a couple dozen maybe, certainly won't be able to fill the 150 list, anyone got a good list so I can just pick them by author? (btw what a pain using connect website lol)

thx

Hi, and welcome to MobileRead.

Because of the nature of what's available in the Public Domain, many of the books available here on this site are Classics.

Off the top of my head, I can certainly recommend many of the titles that I and Harry have worked on. When you say "book," I'm assuming you mean authors, as opposed to titles.

Some of the authors available here are these:

Virginia Woolf
Thomas Wolfe
Charles Dickens
Anthony Trollope
Balzac
AND HUNDREDS MORE

I understand your dilemma. You have two Readers and you are owed 150 free Classics from Sony Connect.

Compare the list here (I beleive the list is downloadable in order to check titles/authors) with what's available from Connect.

There are many titles here that Connect does not have; conversely, there are many titles from Connect that are not available here - YET! We work out of passion; we don't get paid. There are also requests many of us here try to fulill. Don't hesitate to ask.

Getting back to your 150 books you're entitled to: Look at your reading habits and who you like to read. Pehaps there are authors from your past that you've enjoyed. Perhaps you want to experiment with an author. Go to a web site and locate the book and/or information about that book to see if it sounds interesting.

By all means, though, have fun with your two Readers. One hundred fifty books is a lot of reading. Enjoy the Readers and your choices.

If you have a specific question about a book or author, ask and most here will be happy to offer opinions. I might also add that when most of us here do an upload, we supply interesting information that is often fun to read and informative as well.

I hope some of this helps.


Don

[megacoupe]

That's terrible.

I'm not THAT picky when it comes to formatting, as long the flow of reading isn't too inconsistent. My original plan was to use my credits at CONNECT to pick up the classic works written in verse, as they're less likely to be made by the great lrf editors here at MobileRead. If Sony's verse selections are as slapped together as that example of A Midsummer Night's Dream, it may not be worth it.

I guess I'll just try to find works that haven't been uploaded here yet. I wish CONNECT would list the translator of foreign works so I can decide if it's worth having or if I'd rather go buy a hard copy of a good translation at Barnes & Noble...

[LaughingVulcan]

Hmm... now I'm rethinking several of my above titles (Shakespeare, etc.)

I'm going to get "Moby Dick" tonight, just to see how "regular" texts are formatted, also....

[JSWolf]

if they are formatted anything like some other stuff I've seen, get the copy here.

[LaughingVulcan]

^ I'll do that soon for a comparison basis.

For a moment, here is a (very poorly) reduced screenshot of the Sony Version, just FYI for the formatting style.

If you don't like the block style and line-break method of paragraph separation, then this is definitely not the version for you. Scrolling down to get to this point, though, it looked like a good, if bland, version. The beginning of the file said that it's a UPenn downloaded version as the base, so I assume that's PG...

Now, off to give my cat ideas...

[megacoupe]

What I'd like to do, ideally, is pick out some stuff from CONNECT that could be used to aid in the production of more books for the MobileRead repository.

I don't know how it would help exactly, but it's a nice idea...

[Stanart]

Like many others here, I too am getting a Sony Reader through the credit card deal and so am also facing the decision of which 100 classic books to download through Sony Connect. I Googled for lists of best books of all time and found several lists but probably about half the books are still in copyright and so are not in the Sony classics collection. Here is a list of classics that I could find on Sony Connect:

Aeschylus The Oresteia (Agamemnon*, Libation Bearers*, Eumenides)
Alighieri, Dante The Divine Comedy*
Anderson, Sherwood Winesburg, Ohio*
Austen, Jane Emma*
Austen, Jane Northanger Abbey*
Austen, Jane Persuasion*
Austen, Jane Pride and Prejudice*
Austen, Jane Sense and Sensibility*
Bronte, Charlotte Jane Eyre*
Bronte, Emily Wuthering Heights*
Carroll, Lewis Alice in Wonderland*
Carroll, Lewis Through the Looking-Glass
Cervantes, Miguel de Don Quixote*
Chopin, Kate The Awakening*
Conrad, Joseph Heart of Darkness
Conrad, Joseph Lord Jim
Conrad, Joseph Nostromo
Conrad, Joseph The Secret Agent
Dickens, Charles A Tale of Two Cities
Dickens, Charles Great Expectations*
Dickens, Charles Hard Times*
Dickens, Charles Oliver Twist*
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Crime and Punishment*
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor The Brothers Karamazov*
Douglas, Frederick Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas*
Dumas, Alexandre The Count of Monte Cristo*
Ford, Ford Maddox The Good Soldier
Forster, E M A Room With a View*
Forster, E M Howards End
Forster, E M Where Angels Fear to Tread
Hawthorne, Nathaniel The Scarlett Letter
Homer The Illiad*
Homer The Odyssey*
Irving, Washington The Legend of Sleepy Hollow*
James, Henry Daisy Miller
James, Henry Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry The Ambassadors
James, Henry The Wings of a Dove
James, William The Varieties of Religious Experience
Joyce, James A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Joyce, James Dubliners
Lawrence, D H Sons and Lovers*
Lawrence, D H Women in Love
Lewis, Sinclair Babbit
Lewis, Sinclair Main Street
Machiavelli, Nicolo The Prince*
Marx, Carl & Engels, Frederick The Communist Manifesto*
Maugham, W Somerset Of Human Bondage*
Melville, Herman Moby Dick*
Milton, John Paradise Lost*
Paine, Thomas Common Sense
Plato The Republic
Poe, Edgar Allen The Works of Edgar Allen Poe*
Shakespeare, William Hamlet*
Shakespeare, William Othello
Shakespeare, William The Famous History of the Life of Henry the Eight
Shakespeare, William The Tempest*
Shakespeare, William The Tragedy of King Lear*
Shelley, Mary Frankenstein*
Sinclair, Upton The Jungle
Sophocles The Antigone*
Sophocleds Oedipus the King*
Sophocles Oedipus at Colonus
Stevenson, Robert Louis The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Stoker, Bram Dracula*
Swift, Jonathan Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William Makepeace Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David On the Duty of Civil Disobedience
Thoreau, Henry David Walden, or Life in the Woods
Tolsoty, Leo Anna Karenina
Tolsoty, Leo War and Peace*
Twain, Mark Huckleberry Finn*
Twain, Mark Tom Sawyer*
Virgil The Aeneid*
Washington, Booker T Up From Slavery
Wells, H G The Time Machine*
Wells, H G The War of the Worlds*
Wharton, Edith The Age of Innocence
Wharton, Edith The House of Mirth
Whitman, Walt Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar The Picture of Dorian Gray*
The Koran

My apologies if the formatting of the list comes out goofy. The titles marked with asterix can also be found here in Mobilread to the best of my knowledge. There may be others that I missed and some are found within the Harvard Classics collection. There are only about 80 books here so there are still about 20 wildcard selections. Personally, I'm not sure that I will choose all of the books listed here. Also note that on the Connect site that Sony has their own list of 100 recommended classics in anticipation of us that are getting the 100 classics deal, and which I noticed included the 9/11 Report.

I hope that this will be of help to some.

By the way, I have really enjoyed Mobilread and think that there are a lot of great and congenial people here and especially appreciate those that have put in a lot of time and hard work formatting and uploading books.

[Andanzas]

Originally Posted by megacoupe

If Sony's verse selections are as slapped together as that example of A Midsummer Night's Dream, it may not be worth it.

No, it's not usually like that. Shakespeare is especially difficult to format because he makes use of both prose and verse in his plays. The second pic is more representative of what poetry usually looks like at Connect: each verse separated from the rest as if the poem consisted of single-versed stanzas. A horrible choice, in my opinion, but you can get used to it. I downloaded other plays from Ibsen or Chekhov and they seem to be ok, at least at first sight (those plays are only in prose, I think). And novels are also readable: the margins are too wide, the font is rather on the small size, and there are those unnecesary breaks between paragraphs, but they are not horrible.

My two cents:

1. Don't get classics when notes are important to understand the text. I haven't seen a single note in all the classics I've downloaded from Connect (50).
2. Skip Shakespeare. I don't know if the rest of his plays are as badly formatted as A Midsummer Night's Dream, but honestly, I didn't feel like trying. Again, in order to really enjoy Shakespeare, I think notes are important, especially if you are reading him for the first time.
3. If you see a classic here, get it here. Believe me, the editions from MobileRead offer a more enjoyable reading experience.

Some Connect editions that I recommend, not because I think they are good editions but because I haven't seen them in here yet: The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Heart of Darkness, Bartleby the Scrivener, Don Quixote (I think only the first book has been posted here), plays by Chekhov and Ibsen, The Aeneid...

Originally Posted by LaughingVulcan

here is a (very poorly) reduced screenshot

If you save the original screeshot first and reduce it afterwards, you get better results (I assume you are using Paint or a program like that).

[ns66]

thx

on 2nd note, i contacted sony rewards and managed to get my credit changed to $50 + 50 classic books for the other ereader as well, so i only need to get 100 classics which is a bit better lol

by the way, the classic deadline seems to be 11/30 rather than end of this month

http://ebooks.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/e...i=&p_topview=1

[LaughingVulcan]

The other thing to note, as I found as I started using my credits, was that almost every text (10 so far) had multiple versions available. Just about every one had versions published by Random House, HarperCollins, and Sony CONNECT, Inc.

Of course, it's only the Sony CONNECT published ones that are covered.