Best option for GUTENBERG? /free ebooks

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by kandwo

I have a strong preference. I find left justified really distracting; it doesn't agree with me and detracts from the reading experience. It doesn't make reading impossible, but slows it down and makes it somewhat unenjoyable.

It's the same for me. I rarely read public domain books, though. Most of my reading material is pretty new, first released toward the end of the 20th century until today. I just like new books better. Some of my books were free when I got them, but most are purchased.

The paper books I've purchased in the last 10 years are few and far between. Mostly Estonian books with no digital edition at all. I also strongly prefer ebooks to paper.

[RodRiquez]

Originally Posted by davidfor

the browser is a relatively primitive browser.

Thanks David.

I saw that the browser was quite poor & hidden away in the 'beta' menu - so I began to consider compromising that requirement & instead doing as advised & downloading onto computer & syncing from there.

I've spent most of the day checking out the various ebook software & all it's rather a minefield of incompatibility isn't it! The official apps are so egregious they are effectively useless.

Kindle's Desktop App was a bit of a nightmare to even work out how to open a .mobi file as there were no buttons or options to open or import a file - when it finally worked the app crashed & now crashes every time - apparently they have recently removed that ability, & I have managed to 'brick it' first attempt! In the trash with it!

Kobo App is similarly poor. I got a free ebook from the store & that was fine, but it seems you can't use it for your own books so it's worthless as any kind of desktop library. Although it looks nice enough, I would love to use it if it were capable.

Caibre, well... It may have the functionality, but it looks like some ugly cousin of Windows XP that has been locked in the attic for 20 years. Opening an ebook & reading it was awful & very slow - I wouldn't want to use this as any kind of desktop reading software. In fact if I never see that interface again I will be all the happier - Although to be fair I am stuck with version 3 because they dropped support for my Desktop OS. (High Sierra)

Do I have any other options?

Seeking desktop software wasn't my aim at all when I started the thread, I just (foolishly?) assumed that each reader would have a functional desktop library app for the formats the reader supported.

Kobo would however be an excellent option for me as I have about ¥6000 (£40) of Rakuten points I had forgotten about, so the Clara became a lot more attractive!

[RodRiquez]

ah wait - so... if I just download ebooks (whatever formats supported by Kobo Clara) onto my computer & then connect to USB - I can drag & drop the ebooks without needing any special software? (mass storage mode)

If that's the case, I shall do that. Everything else seems really painful.

It seems like the entire eco-system of ebooks is very poorly implemented & fragmented.

Sorry for the moan, I was excited to buy one & now feel like it's a minefield.

[svenlind]

As the OP is interested in classics I think I should recommend this site: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks
The books are very well formatted and are available in epub and Amazon formats.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by svenlind

As the OP is interested in classics I think I should recommend this site: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks
The books are very well formatted and are available in epub and Amazon formats.

The format descriptions are misleaing and an outright lie. I would not download anything from them until they stop the lies.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by RodRiquez

Thanks David.

I saw that the browser was quite poor & hidden away in the 'beta' menu - so I began to consider compromising that requirement & instead doing as advised & downloading onto computer & syncing from there.

As far as I can tell, none of the ereaders have full-featured browsers. Part of this is because the devices are low-powered and probably couldn't run a current browser. And they are very much an extra, not core function. Kobo has it in the "Beta features" and on the Kindle, it is labelled as "experimental".

I've spent most of the day checking out the various ebook software & all it's rather a minefield of incompatibility isn't it! The official apps are so egregious they are effectively useless.

Kindle's Desktop App was a bit of a nightmare to even work out how to open a .mobi file as there were no buttons or options to open or import a file - when it finally worked the app crashed & now crashes every time - apparently they have recently removed that ability, & I have managed to 'brick it' first attempt! In the trash with it!

Kobo App is similarly poor. I got a free ebook from the store & that was fine, but it seems you can't use it for your own books so it's worthless as any kind of desktop library. Although it looks nice enough, I would love to use it if it were capable.

Both applications are only for managing books from their stores. Neither company have any tools for sideloading books. The manual for Kobo explains how to sideload books source elsewhere. I don't know what Amazon says for the Kindle.

Caibre, well... It may have the functionality, but it looks like some ugly cousin of Windows XP that has been locked in the attic for 20 years. Opening an ebook & reading it was awful & very slow - I wouldn't want to use this as any kind of desktop reading software. In fact if I never see that interface again I will be all the happier - Although to be fair I am stuck with version 3 because they dropped support for my Desktop OS. (High Sierra)

And my viewpoint is the opposite. I thank god Kovid hasn't jumped on one of the "modern" interface bandwagons.

As the the version you can use, unfortunately, some of the libraries calibre uses have been updated and do not support older OSes. That does cause some problems supporting newer devices. Some of which can be worked around if there is enough interest.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by RodRiquez

ah wait - so... if I just download ebooks (whatever formats supported by Kobo Clara) onto my computer & then connect to USB - I can drag & drop the ebooks without needing any special software? (mass storage mode).

Yep, that works, too.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by davidfor

And my viewpoint is the opposite. I thank god Kovid hasn't jumped on one of the "modern" interface bandwagons.

Ditto. The Calibre viewer is my default app for reading ebooks on a PC (which I admittedly seldom do). I don't find it slow.

[RodRiquez]

Thank you everyone for your assistance & advice!
I have learned a lot in this thread & everyone has been very civil & helpful.

It wasn't quite the ebook dream I had envisioned, but I think there is a solution for me here somewhere I can be satisfied with.

All the best

[kandwo]

Originally Posted by RodRiquez

ah wait - so... if I just download ebooks (whatever formats supported by Kobo Clara) onto my computer & then connect to USB - I can drag & drop the ebooks without needing any special software? (mass storage mode)

If that's the case, I shall do that. Everything else seems really painful.

It seems like the entire eco-system of ebooks is very poorly implemented & fragmented.

Sorry for the moan, I was excited to buy one & now feel like it's a minefield.

It is a bit annoying with the locked down ecosystems and competing formats, etc. But the good news are that none of this will affect your usage as you've described it. In fact, downloading free classics should be one of the easiest operations around.

Of course, there might be some nuances to it, problems might occur, but that's not very likely and in any case you'll find help here.

I'd advise you to not worry and just dive into the e-reader world. It will all become much clearer once you actually start trying it out for yourself. It will all work out and be enjoyable

[barryem]

I read several Gutenberg books every year and I've found the formatting to be mostly satisfactory. Not everything is precisely to my taste but it's just fine.

I'm an old guy and I read paperback books from the early days when they'd first become available in the 1950s. I began reading ebooks in the 1990s on an HP95lx. So that's about 40 years of reading paperbacks.

Paperbacks were always cheaper in the early days than hardbacks and they were less carefully formatted. Some were very nicely done. Many were not but I read them anyway and I rarely even noticed. There was no choice so why worry about it!

Well all that's changed. Now we have the magic of ereaders and computers with software that can perfect (or ruin) the formatting of any book. And that makes possible people who, on finding the slightest imperfection declare a book to be garbage!

Well folks, we're taught not to judge a book by it's cover and I don't think it's any wiser (or cooler) to judge a book by it's formatting. Those who do are not gurus. They're just fussy people.

I love to read and I judge a book by it's story and it's characters and the quality of it's writing. I'm happy if it's also formatted to my taste but that's not really all that important and more often than not I don't even notice.

By the way, the first decade of ebooks that I read were plain text files with no formatting at all beyond word wrap and paragraph breaks. They had a single font with no bold or italics and no right alignment. All that stuff came later. And they kept getting more and more popular. Imagine that!

Barry

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by barryem

I read several Gutenberg books every year and I've found the formatting to be mostly satisfactory. Not everything is precisely to my taste but it's just fine.

We must be reading different books from Gutenberg. In my unhumble personal opinion, Gutenberg needs to update their automated conversion system.

Originally Posted by barryem

I'm an old guy and I read paperback books from the early days when they'd first become available in the 1950s. I began reading ebooks in the 1990s on an HP95lx. So that's about 40 years of reading paperbacks.

I still have some of my paperbacks from the early 60s including most of the Ace doubles I bought back then. I beat you into reading ebooks by 15 years or so. There were some text file ebooks available shortly after I first built an S-100 bus computer (8 bit Z-80 CPU, 64K of memory though the upper 8K was lost to a ROM monitor) and quite a few more by the time I updated to floppy disks. Add in a modem and BBS systems in a couple of years and I was spending quite a bit of time on etext. I will admit that I started purchasing more hard covers than paperbacks as the 80's moved along.

Originally Posted by barryem

Paperbacks were always cheaper in the early days than hardbacks and they were less carefully formatted. Some were very nicely done. Many were not but I read them anyway and I rarely even noticed. There was no choice so why worry about it!

For the most part, paperbacks that were published after the hardcover had similar formatting while straight to paperback tended to have sloppier formatting. As for being cheaper? I've seldom seen a paperback at any time that was more expensive than the hardcover edition. Part of the cost of getting the book earlier.

Originally Posted by barryem

Well all that's changed. Now we have the magic of ereaders and computers with software that can perfect (or ruin) the formatting of any book. And that makes possible people who, on finding the slightest imperfection declare a book to be garbage!

Well folks, we're taught not to judge a book by it's cover and I don't think it's any wiser (or cooler) to judge a book by it's formatting. Those who do are not gurus. They're just fussy people.

I have to disagree with you. For one, it's not minor imperfections that cause me to declare an ebook to have garbage formatting. I love me a well formatted ebook but I can live with minor formatting errors such using both indents and spacing between paragraphs. OTOH, switching between left, full & right justified with some centered pages thrown in just for fun, using multiple fonts that remind of the early days of the Macintosh where ransom note was a common description for what were supposed to professional documents, homonym abuse, etc. Quite a few of the sins of formatting that have been decried for years. Remember Liz Castro's Pigs, Gourds and Wikis blog?

As for being a guru? I tend to use that to describe people such as Hitch and Tex2002ans.

Fussy? Yes. When it's easily possible to avoid most common formatting errors with most of the available ebook creation packages, it becomes harder to forgive sheer sloppiness.

Originally Posted by barryem

I love to read and I judge a book by it's story and it's characters and the quality of it's writing. I'm happy if it's also formatted to my taste but that's not really all that important and more often than not I don't even notice.

That you don't seem to notice bad formatting does not make it any less bad.

Originally Posted by barryem

By the way, the first decade of ebooks that I read were plain text files with no formatting at all beyond word wrap and paragraph breaks. They had a single font with no bold or italics and no right alignment. All that stuff came later. And they kept getting more and more popular. Imagine that!

I remember reading quite a few books that did not use bold or italic. Quite a few of them also had painful to view rivers, full justification that reminded me of the some of the early computer justification where a line would look like "t h i s a p a r a g r a p h". OTOH, some of them had excellent justification, hyphenation that showed familiarity with the language, etc. depending on the printer. Much like today some of them did a much better job than others.

[Quoth]

I check the first chapter or so. Often I use Calibre to do a quick fix up of format. I have actually BOUGHT worse formatted ebooks on Amazon, exported as RTF, edited as odt in LO Writer and final export/saveAs as docx to make epub and dual mobi (or AZW3) again.

[4691mls]

Since you are interested in free books - if there is a public library in your area that has free access to electronic books, you may also want to look into which ereaders would work with the library system.

[RodRiquez]

I ended up with a Kobo Clara & love it. (Far more than expected actually!)

I am just returning to answer my own question: which is that the KOBO alone can not be used on Project Gutenberg because the website does not function well enough to navigate or be usable. So the only option is to use a computer & transfer via USB.