Feedbooks or Manybooks: Which do you prefer?

[HistoryWes]

Which do you prefer-- Feedbooks or Manybooks. They are both great sites with tons of great books (well not literally tons, since they are ebooks). Feebooks offers pdf books formatted for the size of the PRS screen. Manybooks offers lrf books. Many books tend to have a lot of Project Gutenberg text at the beginning of the book which can be annoying, but they usually include the old-timey cover in the file, which I like. Which do you prefer.

[HarryT]

Neither. The books "hand formatted" here at MobileRead are generally better than either.

Of the two sites, though, Feedbooks does a LOT better job of formatting.

[HistoryWes]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Neither. The books "hand formatted" here at MobileRead are generally better than either.

Oh, I agree completely. The books that are here at MobileRead are best, but there are a bazillion books out there.

[Stingo]

Ditto. Mobileread formatted books are tops. That said I'm not a big fan of pdf on the reader so my vote and gratitude goes to Manybooks for the excellent job that they've done in providing such a broad selection.

[tompe]

Feedbook can also generate MobiPocket and ePub. I think Feedbook is a good idea since it use semantic markup and try to use it just to show that i like the approach.

[Seabound]

If it's a choice between the two, then Feedbooks is much better. One can tell that no human reads the books at Manybooks, either before or after formatting, i.e. it seems to be a fully automated set-up with quite buggy formatting software. It's a good infrastructure, though, if improvements to the ebook production process are made.

[mtravellerh]

feedbook generally offers better formatting than Manybooks, Manybooks has more book formats. Both do not feature in book graphics. I prefer Feedbooks to Manybooks, though.

[HistoryWes]

Just to reiterate what everyone has said, the books here at MobileRead are by far the best. I've been replacing books that I had downloaded prior to discovering this forum with these. You can tell there was a great deal of care put into converting these. I imagine that if book companies wanted to digitize their backlists (another thread), they could find some great workers here who could do it economically.

[desertgrandma]

Originally Posted by HistoryWes

Which do you prefer-- Feedbooks or Manybooks. They are both great sites with tons of great books (well not literally tons, since they are ebooks). Feebooks offers pdf books formatted for the size of the PRS screen. Manybooks offers lrf books. Many books tend to have a lot of Project Gutenberg text at the beginning of the book which can be annoying, but they usually include the old-timey cover in the file, which I like. Which do you prefer.

Have you looked at our books?

1) Mobileread
2) Feedbooks
3) Manybooks.

[Man Eating Duck]

While Manybooks have a greater selection, I completely agree with HarryT in that Feedbooks have superior formatting. I started checking it out on saturday when I got an iLiad, and have already read two books from there. A brilliant site!

With Manybooks I'll have to do quite a bit of formatting to get the book readable at all.

I don't know if Hadrien or anyone else from feedbooks will read this, but I have a few suggestions (nitpicking really). They seem quite responsive to suggestions from their users from what I'm reading here
I searched the forums, but if there already is a thread about this it may be in French, or not very active.

Search: It's a little confusing. I searched for Clarke (Arthur C.), he has written a few stories that are online legally. I got hits for Peter Watts among many others, probably because of his novels featuring Lenie Clarke (which are good, by the way). Maybe an advanced search function? Or, at least, when I select "Author" the search will be for the name of an author, not just return author nodes (It seems that you're using Drupal).

Word count: When I want to check out an author I've been recommended I frequently want to check out his/her short stories, if any, to see if I like the style. A categorization might also work, but a word count is easy to develop, cheap on the db (count and store only when updating the book) and would be helpful.

Custom PDF bug: There seems to be a bug; when I change preferences I will frequently get the previous, cached version. Other times I will get a freshly generated one with the new settings. I've experienced this when changing font sizes and fonts. I see the value in caching, but people will rarely be requesting the exact same custom PDF twice.

Clickable PDF TOC: This might be more complex, since you'd need to generate the PDF first, then TOC, and merge them. It would nevertheless be a valuable addition, and one I'm sure that you have already thought of.

Floating point values: Again for custom PDF. There is a difference between font sizes 8 and 7.5
This might be an issue with your generator, but FP values for font size is supported by most software.

Names: What's up with the surname-only policy? A very small nitpick, but my monitor has room for given names as well
It looks very strange, in addition given names can be an advantage when scanning long list for a specific person. Or maybe it's just me.

Again: this is mostly nitpicking, I give these tips because I really like the site. I understand it is under constant development as well, maybe my requests are already in the pipeline.

Cheers, and keep up the good work!

[dhbailey]

That's interesting -- I find that I like reading the Manybooks-formatted books much better than many on Mobileread (although the time spent for accuracy in the Mobileread-formatted books is definitely a plus). I know that anybody can create their own custom PDF formatting on Feedbooks, but it's just so much easier to download the Manybooks file, open them on my Reader, and start reading without feeling the need to re-format them at all.

I don't mind the PG text at the beginning of the manybooks files -- how hard is it to turn a few pages to get to the start of the text?

Since neither Manybooks nor Feedbooks includes the illustrations, for a lot of books for which the illustrations are important, the mobileread books can't be beat!

But it is really just a personal taste issue, and what one expects from one's reading experience on the device -- for that I find that Manybooks works just fine and is easier than Feedbooks to get the smaller .lrf files.

In any event, check out the many fine books here at mobileread, and use either of the two other sources for books you can't find here, or for which you're not happy with the formatting of the Mobileread books.

[Hadrien]

Originally Posted by Man Eating Duck

Search: It's a little confusing. I searched for Clarke (Arthur C.), he has written a few stories that are online legally. I got hits for Peter Watts among many others, probably because of his novels featuring Lenie Clarke (which are good, by the way). Maybe an advanced search function? Or, at least, when I select "Author" the search will be for the name of an author, not just return author nodes (It seems that you're using Drupal).

Use "author:" in your search to list the books from one specific author: http://www.feedbooks.com/discover/se...uthor:Doctorow
You can use "surname:" or "firstname:" to search for a specific author: http://www.feedbooks.com/discover/se...rname:doctorow

Originally Posted by Man Eating Duck

Word count: When I want to check out an author I've been recommended I frequently want to check out his/her short stories, if any, to see if I like the style. A categorization might also work, but a word count is easy to develop, cheap on the db (count and store only when updating the book) and would be helpful.

While visiting the page of an author, click on order: Type to group short stories together.

Originally Posted by Man Eating Duck

Custom PDF bug: There seems to be a bug; when I change preferences I will frequently get the previous, cached version. Other times I will get a freshly generated one with the new settings. I've experienced this when changing font sizes and fonts. I see the value in caching, but people will rarely be requesting the exact same custom PDF twice.

We don't cache custom PDFs, probably a bug with the HTTP headers for the cache (they're not well supported by the different browsers)

Originally Posted by Man Eating Duck

Clickable PDF TOC: This might be more complex, since you'd need to generate the PDF first, then TOC, and merge them. It would nevertheless be a valuable addition, and one I'm sure that you have already thought of.

For formats where you can handle the TOC in the metadata (PDF & ePub) we don't add an inline TOC. We have a clickable multi-level TOC on every PDF, the problem is on the iLiad's side (works fine on a desktop computer, or the Sony Reader).

Originally Posted by Man Eating Duck

Floating point values: Again for custom PDF. There is a difference between font sizes 8 and 7.5
This might be an issue with your generator, but FP values for font size is supported by most software.

Correct, we should fix this.

Originally Posted by Man Eating Duck

Names: What's up with the surname-only policy? A very small nitpick, but my monitor has room for given names as well
It looks very strange, in addition given names can be an advantage when scanning long list for a specific person. Or maybe it's just me.

We display surnames only while listing books. If you have a list of authors, you'll see their full names.

[pilotbob]

I like feedbooks. I very rarely go to manybooks.net any more. Between Mobileread and Feedbooks I have found whatever I was looking for. And I love to grab stuff from Feedbooks using Whispernet on my Kindle.

BTW: Hadrien, what ever happen to the eBook Reader that you said you guys were working on? Is that project still in the works. I haven't heard about it in ages.

BOb

[jmorton]

Originally Posted by HarryT

...The books "hand formatted" here at MobileRead are generally better than either.

I'll join the chorus on this one. The MobileRead forum books are the best. When I got my first Reader, I downloaded some of the free books that Sony offered, but found that most of these were riddled with typos. Typos so bad some times as to reduce sentences into gibberish. I've never had that problem here at MobileRead, plus the selection is far better and more interesting.

Bravo everyone! (Or is it 'Bravi?')

[dhbailey]

Originally Posted by jmorton

Bravo everyone! (Or is it 'Bravi?')

Bravo is masculine or plural. Brava is singular for a female. Bravi is nothing at all.

And I second your emotion -- Bravo indeed for the many fine people who have crafted excellent books on this forum!