06:20 PM by ghchinoy in E-Book General | News

The Pragmatic Programmers, publishers of exceptional software programming topics, have just added ePub and mobi formats as options for their books (they've already had PDF as an option for pre-release as well as released books).

http://media.pragprog.com/newsletters/2009-03-25.html

http://www.pragprog.com/frequently-a...estions/ebooks

I've purchased books from them in the past, including "pre-release" books that they deliver as PDFs and have used Mobigen/mobicreator to convert the PDFs to prc's with limited success. The PDFs have complex formatting, as they're pretty much publication-ready proofs, so footnotes and images were all over the place, as was kerning and other layout goodness.

Downloading a few, their conversion is decent with footnotes and references linked, pictures sized appropriately. The table of contents isn't referenced correctly so the Kindle menu can't find it, but contents work to jump between chapters.

In all, a wonderful addition to our ebook life.

I also downloaded the ePub versions and they looked good in calibre's reader.

Welcome Dave & Andy and Pragprog!

H

02:43 AM by mtravellerh in E-Book General | News

Today I noticed something peculiar: There is a new format supported by Project Gutenberg. Besides Epub (we have discussed this in other thread) there are now some books in Mobi format. Up till now I haven't seen any official news from PG concerning this astonishing move. Mobis (illustrated and non illustrated) can be found, among others, in "Why I Believe in Scouting for Girls by Mary Roberts Rinehart" and in "Ben, the Luggage Boy; by Horatio Alger", both books featuring an illustrated and non-illustrated Mobi version.

On first view, the books seem quite nicely formatted, with the usual blurb before and after the body of the book. Covers, however, are correctly defined and display outside of the book body (they appear in the book body a second time).

No such luck for TOCs. The inline TOCs seem to be working (so far) but no outside one (it would have been quite easy via a simple anchor definition, though).

The books are justified and do have correct metadata as far as I could see. We don't know anything about the scale of the Mobi integration yet, but we hope that this evolution goes parallel with the Epub integration. There is for sure something moving inside PG.

Update:

In the format explanation, PG gives this short statement:

Important notice: Mobipocket files are a new experimental feature (as of 2009-03-22). Some or all Project Gutenberg Mobipocket files may be buggy or may not work altogether.

02:27 PM by kovidgoyal in E-Book Software | Calibre

Hi all,

I finally got around to implementing the long promised email support in calibre. As of 0.5.3 you can click a button to mail books to your kindle and have calibre automatically mail downloaded news to it as well. The email support is not kindle specific, so you can use it to email yourself books as attachments and access them on any device that lets you read email and has an ebook viewer.

To set it up, start the preferences, go to "Email delivery", and type in a From email address (all emails sent by calibre will appear to come from this email address). Then just add as many To email address as you want and calibre will mail books to all of them. Once that's done, click the little arrow next to the Send to device button to actually email a book.

calibre will normally try to send mail to the destination address directly from the computer it is running on, but if this doesn't work (because the destination email service only accepts mail from "well known" mail servers), you can also have calibre use your mail server to send the mails.

Of course all these features are extremely beta, so YMMV.

12:06 PM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Announcements

Responding to your recent feedback, we have decided to launch a poll where you can help us choose how to handle "serious" off-topic discussions in our community.

From all the feedback we have received, we were able to pin it down to two options that we got:

Option 1) Leave "Lounge" as it is and add another section - "Salon" (or "The Study", or similarly named) - under Miscellaneous. The new section will hold topics which don't fit within any of the other sections and that go beyond mere banter (which is a predominant theme in the Lounge). It'd be where folks can gather to discuss issues of importance to them with minimal diversions into "silliness" (as we would generally agree on).

Option 2) Add a new sortable thread prefix - "Keep it Sensible" (or similarly named) - in the Lounge section to go alongside "Silliness" and "Meet Up". The prefix would indicate that folks want to discuss issues of importance to them with minimal diversions into "silliness" (as we would generally agree on).

Technical note: It is possible to exclude forums from your new post searches, but it is not possible to exclude threads based on their prefix.

Hence -

Option 1 would give you the advantage to be able to competely ignore either section in new post searches (optional, through your user settings), while option 2 has the advantage that all off-topic posts would still be located within the same section.

We will make this poll a quick one (it runs for only three or four days), so please go ahead and vote for your favorite option.

As always, hearing what you have to say, whether criticism or praise, helps us a lot to improve this community. Thanks for your support!

10:58 AM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

Picador is a Macmillan imprint that specializes in literary trade paperbacks. Today they are announcing a new book club:

Today we are proud to announce the inaugural session of our new book club on Twitter. The Book Club grew out of Picador’s observations of a growing literary community on Twitter, as bloggers, readers and publishers have come together over the past few months on this new social networking platform. We are excited to be a part of this quickly growing venture and to engage with our fellow online booklovers!

...

Our first selection (hashtag #pic1) is paperback original THE HOUSEKEEPER AND THE PROFESSOR by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder and now an INDIE NEXT PICK (February 2009.)

We will give away 20 copies of the book to Twitter users at 2:00 PM ET Tuesday, March 24th and on Friday April 10th, editor David Rogers will moderate discussion on the book and take Twitterers’s questions.

The following Book Club pick (hashtag pic#2) will be Augusten Burroughs’s A WOLF AT THE TABLE (giveaway Tuesday, March 31st) and Augusten himself will join Picador to host the discussion on Friday, April 17th. For a complete list of upcoming book club picks and more information on how to participate, check out www.picadorbookclub.com.

09:13 AM by Nate the great in E-Book General | News

Editor's Note: The following links go to webpages that are not in English. If you need them to be translated, Google has translation tools here.

PocketBook is a Ukraine based Netronix distributor similar to Bookeen. The reader software they ported is FBReader, and they just announced that they will support an open source project called PocketBook Free.

They've been selling the PocketBook 301 for some time now, and recently announced a new 5" reader called the 360°. Technical details are sparse, but you can find pictures here, and a brief writeup here. All I know so far is that the device probably has an accelerometer.

06:00 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Week in Review

Have something interesting to say about e-books or mobile computing? Join our forums and share your view on topics like the ones discussed at MobileRead this past week...

E-Book General - News and Commentary

• 3 Ebook Events in May
• Is the Amazon Kindle infringing patents?
• Fujitsu FLEPia released!
• Diesel eBooks to offer special ebook bundles
• Sony Partners With Google To Bring More Than 500,000 Books To The Reader
• Christian Science Monitor labels Kindle a ‘Trojan horse’
• Sony Reader figures: +100K in four months?
• Hugo Novel Nominees are all ebooks

E-Book General - Writers' Corner

• Authonomy - a new site by Harper Collins

E-Book Software - Reading Software

• FBReader 0.10.4 (on Nokia Internet Tablets)

E-Book Devices - Sony Portable Reader PRS-700

• Price cut on the Sony PRS-700

02:36 AM by wallcraft in E-Book General | News

The nominees for the 2009 Hugo awards have been announced, see AnticipationSF: Hugos. The novels are all available as ebooks.

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow is a free download, and all the others are in the Kindle store. This may be a first -- only half of last years' nominees were available as ebooks.