Google guy develops Gutenberg-to-Sony proxy tool

[TadW]

From his blog, Sergey Solyanik writes:

I am in the process of writing a proxy web site that would be a projection of gutenberg.org, but would add an option to download the file in a LRF format (which I would construct on the fly from the text files).

Fascinating what one can do with a few lines of (Python) code!

[Alexander Turcic]

Fascinating what one can do with a few lines of (Python) code!

Let's not forget that he also uses Sven's command line tool to convert to LRF.

[dhbailey]

Thanks for that link -- the concept has great potential.

However, I think that it will be a bit better than reading the PG books as plain text files and certainly not as good as the human-converted books being uploaded here at mobileread. The use of illustrations in many of these files is a very nice touch (even if such editions limit the number of books we take with us at one time), and the links to chapters is a great touch that it will be interesting to see if Sven's converter can match.

But with so many PG books and so few (relatively speaking) people making these wonderful conversions at this site (I so wish I had time to add to this terrific library) a tool such as Sven is offering may well be a terrific way to get better reading experiences from PG files until such time as someone takes the time to make better conversions.

Now if someone could come up with a native LRF editor so that Sven's tool could do the original conversion and then if a person wanted to, more features could be added to the original LRF file.

[kovidgoyal]

Umm aren't most PG books already available in LRF format from manybooks.net, all converted with makelrf? And somebody should tell him to use gutenmark + html2lrf for much better results.

[solyanik]

http://1-800-magic.blogspot.com/2008...pre-alpha.html

To the people who suggested using different technology: I will, eventually. Just give me time :-). So far I have set up the framework. Extending and improving it will be easy.