Nice blog article about MR uploads

[Bob Russell]

Thought you guys would like this if you haven't seen it already.
http://jeff-duntemann.livejournal.com/136476.html

Here's a sample...

I follow Mobileread, which now has about 3,800 free ebooks online for download, the bulk of them pre-1923 works, some well-known (they have Dickens' complete works now) and some pretty obscure, like the Scottish Psalter of 1650. Mobileread is interesting because people are creating versions in the popular small-screen ebook reader formats like Ebookwise, MobiPocket and BBeB rather than raw text—nor formats used primarily on PCs, like PDF and MS Reader.

I continue to boggle at people reading Thackeray on their cellphones, but boggle or no boggle, it's being done. The classics are coming back. I can't entirely explain it, but I have some hunches:

* Many of these ebook editions are beautifully done. The Dickens canon is the work of one man named Harry in the UK, and they include some of the nice old 19th Century woodcut illustrations plus color covers where those were available. (Oliver Twist, yes. Martin Chuzzlewit, no.) They are not shot full of OCR errors and gaps like some of the stuff I've downloaded from other places, including the venerable Project Gutenberg.
* They are free and they are easy to get. There are no hurdles to jump, nothing to sign up for, no money to lay out, and no DRM to drop sand in the gears of the experience.
* There are no ethical issues involved in obtaining them or passing them on. I still think people are basically honest, and they do consider the rights of copyright holders.
* They're classics because they have withstood the test of time. They're good.

Very nice.

[Bob Russell]

And how about this for having the uploads potentially scattered throughout others sites like Wikipedia!... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trader_Horn

[JSWolf]

Very nice! Jeff has good taste in free eBooks. I've left a comment as well.

[RWood]

Wikipedia also has a reference to our version of the Harvard Classics.

[RCR]

Thanks for the link to that blog, Bob.

Jeff Duntemann has a number of thoughtful posts on ebooks. Here's a sample from his Dec 1, 2007 entry. He is comparing small, flowing text only screens to typeset, purposefully laid out pages of real books:

"...If we're just reading to make the time go by, novels on a PDA or cellphone display can work well. This is "one-dimensional" reading; think of it as slurping text through a straw..."

[Jeff Duntemann]

Many thanks to Bob for linking to ContraPositive, and while I'm here, I also want to thank everybody who contributes to MobileRead for all the work they've done both on the downloadable classics and answering questions.

I doubt I would be reading Martin Chuzzlewit now if I had had to go hunt down a physical copy. (It's not a popular book in the US, for reasons you'll understand once you read it...)

Well done, well done.

[charlieperry]

I love reading classics. I can feel my vocabulary being enriched as I read!

[MaggieScratch]

I read a LOT of classics! About 75 percent of the e-books on my Cybook are classics from manybooks, feedbooks, and here at mobileread. All of the books on my Treo are classics (though I bought some of them before I found freebies).

I am always showing off ebooks to my fellow Jane Austen fans. Some who do a lot of writing about Jane really appreciate the searchability and copy and paste-ability of ebooks. (I have all of her books in HTML on one of my websites with a search engine).

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by MaggieScratch

I read a LOT of classics! About 75 percent of the e-books on my Cybook are classics from manybooks, feedbooks, and here at mobileread. All of the books on my Treo are classics (though I bought some of them before I found freebies).

I am always showing off ebooks to my fellow Jane Austen fans. Some who do a lot of writing about Jane really appreciate the searchability and copy and paste-ability of ebooks. (I have all of her books in HTML on one of my websites with a search engine).

I finished Pride and Prejudice on my Reader a month ago and am currently enjoying the Masterpiece theater presentation on PBS.

Great stuff.
Dale

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Jeff Duntemann

Many thanks to Bob for linking to ContraPositive, and while I'm here, I also want to thank everybody who contributes to MobileRead for all the work they've done both on the downloadable classics and answering questions.

I doubt I would be reading Martin Chuzzlewit now if I had had to go hunt down a physical copy. (It's not a popular book in the US, for reasons you'll understand once you read it...)

Well done, well done.

Very nice Blog article you have written.