08-05-2009, 04:45 AM | #1 | |
Wizard
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Google ebooks
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Are these Google ebooks DRM, and if not, will calibre convert them to LRF format nicely? They are all PD books, right? Is there anything nice there that is not available elsewhere? Sample book, anyone? |
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08-05-2009, 04:55 AM | #2 | |
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Sample attached. |
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10-13-2009, 06:03 PM | #3 |
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My experience with the google books from the sony library is that they are so poorly formatted as to be nearly unreadable. There are many scanning errors, and the formatting and misspelling makes it such a chore that I can't enjoy reading them.
These are all older books for which the copyright has expired, and google has scanned many of them, and continues to scan more. Rob |
10-13-2009, 08:44 PM | #4 |
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The google books on the Sony site are all in EPub. They don't have DRM.
To me, they look as though someone generated an automatic text file from the original PDFs at the Google site, then sent the result to an EPub converter. As your 500 won't read EPub, you may well be better going directly to Google Books and running a conversion yourself, AprilHare. Or just see whether the PDF is readable on your 500. PDFRead just might work here: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=21906 According to the write-up in our wiki, it is a tool for converting primarily PDF and DJVU documents for reading on eBook devices. It does this by creating an image out of each page, enhancing the image and then collating the images in a device-specific format (supports .IMP/.RB/.OEB/.LRF/.PRC/.HTML) |
10-13-2009, 09:19 PM | #5 |
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I couldn't find When It Was Dark by Guy Thorne anywhere else. It was poorly formatted (i.e. it had obviously been computer-generated from the scanned book), but it was readable and free - and a pretty good read. I heard Christopher Hitchens mention it in a debate and after checking the other places (e.g. Project Gutenberg, MobileRead and Feedbooks) I found it at Google Books.
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10-13-2009, 10:00 PM | #6 |
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It's just a partnership with Google, and they're the ones scanning the books. I haven't downloaded any of them (haven't needed to), but my coworker got turned onto it since he likes esoteric stuff. If you find one you want but it's poorly formatted on not on MR, clean it up yourself or see if someone here will (all to expand our library of course).
Like others said already, most aren't going to be pretty. But if it's the only source, hey that's something. |
10-13-2009, 10:05 PM | #7 | |
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10-13-2009, 10:09 PM | #8 | |
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Man, just think what will happen if Google will be allowed to post the "orphaned" books...that will be awesome. But I guess that's another thread elsewhere, heh. |
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10-13-2009, 10:09 PM | #9 |
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Many of the Google books have also been uploaded to The Internet Archive's texts section, and are available there in PDF, also a .txt generated automatically from the PDF (with lots of errors), and quite often in DJVU as well.
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11-03-2009, 09:42 PM | #10 |
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Well, you may be better off using the non-DRM ePUB and converting that to LRF.
ePUB is just a ZIP file containing html files for the book and contents. You can just change the .epub extension to .zip, unzip it, and you have the .xhtml files (which are just very strict HTML). A good html converter should handle it from there. -Pie |
12-01-2009, 02:42 AM | #11 |
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Just thinking this over: is there anything that would prevent us improving these EPUBs manually using the Google Books scans and sigil, then reposting them elsewhere, i.e. MobileRead?
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12-01-2009, 06:59 AM | #12 |
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There's no problem doing that with public domain books, April. I've done a few myself.
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