Project Gutenberg books ALL available in LRF

[coolbooks]

Hi,

I just bought a Sony PRS505 and absolutely love it. The screen quality is outstanding and it has really put back enjoyment into my reading.

I wanted to get more eBooks onto my Sony so I developed some software to convert from Project Gutenberg books into Sony LRF format.

You can try it out at www.coolfreebooks.com

Please remember that this is being provided free of charge although I will obviously respond to emails etc I cannot 100% guarantee that all enhancements will be implemented.

Regards,

Trevor

[FizzyWater]

Hi, Trevor! Nice of you to post your site!

There are lots of PG books already converted for Sony here in the eBook Uploads and on Feedbooks and Manybooks, too. If you're looking for new books to convert, you might want to check there first. And if you're converting books that aren't available here, you might want to upload them here, too...

[Elsi]

Hello coolbooks -- thanks for posting this message. Your contribution may prove very valuable to the Sony owners here.

I've moved your post from our uploads forum -- since that forum should contain messages with book files attached -- to the LRF formatting forum. I've also deleted the duplicate messages you posted.

We're glad you've joined MobileRead and plunged right in offering converted books. Please join the various conversations and share what you've learned about formatting for the Sony.

[coolbooks]

Originally Posted by FizzyWater

Hi, Trevor! Nice of you to post your site!

There are lots of PG books already converted for Sony here in the eBook Uploads and on Feedbooks and Manybooks, too. If you're looking for new books to convert, you might want to check there first. And if you're converting books that aren't available here, you might want to upload them here, too...

What my program does is to allow you to search Gutenberg. Then, once you have selected a book it creates a brand new LRF file which is then offered as a download.

This means that I do not have to choose which books to convert since they are all done dynamically and on demand.

Regards,

Trevor

[RWood]

Interesting site. It does seem though that they are mechanical (automated) LRF creations of the original Project Gutenberg texts. PG conventions like "_italic text_" are shown rather than "italic text" and the few I examined had a listing for a Table of Contents with no entries in the TOC.

While I applaud the effort, how do the books on your site differ from the books on Manybooks?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by coolbooks

What my program does is to allow you to search Gutenberg. Then, once you have selected a book it creates a brand new LRF file which is then offered as a download.

This means that I do not have to choose which books to convert since they are all done dynamically and on demand.

Regards,

Trevor

Does your program put in a proper ToC, convert _text_ to italic and -- to em dash? Will it use the HTML as the source if one exists?

This does sound good.

[coolbooks]

Hi,

Sorry, I don't know what ManyBooks is .. if you could please give me a link I will take a look. The idea behind my site is to provide access to all the PG books as and when people require them, it is not to store all books in LRF format.

As for the Italics .. I have to admit that I had not done my homework with regards to this. I will add in Italics and emphasis tonight.

For the table of contents I will have to check how consistent the PG books actually are, once I have established this then I can create TOC.

In the process of creating a LRF book I actually do some work on the .txt file and convert it into html so I could use the html versions and cut out a step.

It is a work in progress but I am a very competent programmer and I am confident that I can do almost anything required to create perfect LRF books.

Regards,

Trevor

[BruceB]

How about adding some options to let me choose font size, margins, etc. in the likely event that I have different desires for those than the last person to format the book.

[nrapallo]

Originally Posted by coolbooks

Hi,

Sorry, I don't know what ManyBooks is .. if you could please give me a link I will take a look. The idea behind my site is to provide access to all the PG books as and when people require them, it is not to store all books in LRF format.

Here is a link http://manybooks.net/about/ . They offer almost all the PG books in various download formats.

As for the Italics .. I have to admit that I had not done my homework with regards to this. I will add in Italics and emphasis tonight.

That would be a nice addition!

For the table of contents I will have to check how consistent the PG books actually are, once I have established this then I can create TOC.

Automatic TOC generation is tricky (Mobipocket Creator/Calibre do it using RegEx and HTML tags; BookDesigner does this also very well). It would improve the usefulness of your conversions.

In the process of creating a LRF book I actually do some work on the .txt file and convert it into html so I could use the html versions and cut out a step.

Could you allow the "intermediary" .html to be offered for download as well. That could be used to convert to other formats, like .prc/.mobi using mobigen or .epub using Calibre.

It is a work in progress but I am a very competent programmer and I am confident that I can do almost anything required to create perfect LRF books.

Regards,

Trevor

Thanks for sharing this!

How do you convert .html to .lrf? In PDFRead, I used the python pylrs package by Mike Higgins (Falstaff) to produce .lrf from .html containing primarily images and not a lot of text.

Have you seen this similar (but over-the-top) effort before: Converting Project Gutenberg books to SONY Reader?

Here's the direct link to Project Gutenberg for the SONY Reader devices.

[RWood]

ManyBooks.net is the URL. From their About page:

All of the eBooks from manybooks.net are free, however donations toward the maintenance of the site are welcome.

Many of the etexts are from the November, 2003 Project Gutenberg DVD, which contains the entire Project Gutenberg archives except for the Human Genome Project and audio eBooks, due to size limitations, and the Project Gutenberg of Australia eBooks, due to copyright. As of July 2004 most current PG texts are available here, usually within the week of release. There are also public domain and creative commons works from other sources.

Zip archives are stored in the same directory structure as on the DVD, with Author, Title, and related information stored in a MySQL database. Pages are built with PHP and served using the Apache webserver. The server is a 1.66GHz Intel Core Duo Mac mini running Mac OS X 10.4, located at macminicolo.net.

eBooks are generated on demand using a variety of tools, and cached for future readers - which means that the first time anyone requests an eBook in a particular format it will take a bit longer to deliver, but the next time that eBook is requested it will be sent immediately.

Interesting Statistics

Popular formats - a running count of the relative popularity of each ebook format.
Most Popular eBooks of 2008
Most Popular eBooks of 2007
Most Popular eBooks of 2005
Most Popular eBooks of 2004

Conversion tools:

* gut or txt2html for text -> html.
* PHP-PDB for Palm Doc.
* Pyrite Publisher. (might be gone - see Freshmeat project page for some information.)
* Plucker.
* iSilo386.
* makedoc.
* rbmake for RocketBook format.
* makeztxt for ztxt format.
* htmldoc for HTML -> PDF conversion.
* HTMLtidy for fixing up the automatic HTML generated by "gut".
* TCR.
* makelrf 0.3
* makebook for eReader format.
* methods originally developed by Daniel Duris for iPod Notes conversion.
* Apple's textutil command for RTF.
* Desktop Connection Library for Newton Paperback format.
* Mobigen.exe for Mobipocket format.
* Wine to run mobigen.exe on OS X.
* Componnents of mjBook for cellphone ".jar" files
* HAWHAW toolkit for the WAP site http://mnybks.net.
* Calibre for ePUB format.

You can contribute to the digitization of public domain books by participating in Distributed Proofreading.

[JenPen1]

Hi Coolbooks

I am a newbie, but wanted to let you know that I had just tried out your site. Great job.
FYI there is another website besides www.manybooks.com that you can look at to download books for your PRS505. It makes several different formats available, including LRF. They are always bringing in new books. The site is www.feedbooks.com

Jen

[mtravellerh]

There are no LRFs available on Feedbook, only custom sized PDF files and epub (oncerning the Sony 505)

[JenPen1]

Originally Posted by mtravellerh

There are no LRFs available on Feedbook, only custom sized PDF files and epub (oncerning the Sony 505)

My error, I was thinking of ePub for Sony and typed in LRF. Thanks for bringing that to our attention, mtravellerh.

[coolbooks]

Great info, thanks.

Where I think I can really add value is in the ability to customize your LRF files. You can set almost any parameter such as font size and margins.

I have had a look at manybooks.net and I can see that they offer books in LRF as well. I don't want to recreate what they have done so your input is very much appreciated.

I have fixed italics but I am confused by emphasis. -- does not always have a termination of -- to indicate that emphasis should stop. In html version of Emma by Jane Austen for instance, the html does not contain any emphasis. I would like some advise on how to implement emphasis, I cannot see anything in the Project Gutenberg documentation.

Regards,

Trevor

[coolbooks]

Hi everyone,

I have added the ability to set margins and text size now.

Hope you like it, I will be doing some more work on allowing you to set more parameters (such as font name).

www.coolfreebooks.com

Regards,

Trevor