December 2009 - gutvol-d - lists.pglaf.org

Re: Some Things I Like the Best and the Least About eBooks
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 04 Dec '09

04 Dec '09

jon richfield said: > So far no one has been listening to me, but just wait > till I get the Earth's orbit properly synchronised! > THEN they will be sorry, ALL of them! > They have to adopt my new calendar for certain! jon, i want to buy michael hart a present for the holidaze... is there someplace online where i can order your calendar? i'd like the swimsuit edition, please. thank you ever so much. -bowerbird

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New mobile devices page (pls. proofread)
by Greg Newby 04 Dec '09

04 Dec '09

The number of requests to help@ for kindle and similar device support has grown quite a lot, and so I finally spent some time writing a how-to for this topic. Your feedback is requested: http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:MobileReader_Devices_How-To I included a link to James Adcock's magic catalog, but am not sure whether this is updated regularly/automatically. I would also be happy to link to good external content. The main thing I don't want to do it provide all the details for all devices, since that will be hard to verify and maintain. While this page is in the protected content area, there is already a page set up for user-contributed content, where I would love to see some more detailed advice on specific devices, conversion programs, etc.: http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:The_Project_Gutenberg_Wiki TIA. Greg

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Re: Some Things I Like the Best and the Least About eBooks
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 03 Dec '09

03 Dec '09

michael said: > Or bowerbird, who at least argues both sides. . . . actually, michael, when it comes to _formats_, i've been arguing on _your_ side, exclusively, for many years now. indeed, my main point in regard to _formats_ is that you should actually follow the rules for your format, all of your rules, all of the time, in all of your books, so i guess i could argue that i support your format more than you do. certainly more than your whitewashers do... > when even the plainest of plain text eBooks > is created, 99% of the work of re-creating it > into another format is already done, all YOU > have to do is change 1% and you can have it > any other way you want it. On top of this, > there are many format conversion programs > out there that will do most of this for you. well, if you followed all the rules of your format, format conversion programs could do all the work. even now, with the whitewashers' inconsistencies, apps like eucalyptus can (on-the-fly) convert your .txt files to beautiful e-books even on inferior kit. there are people here who question you, michael. i am not one of them. no, i argue _against_ them. -bowerbird

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Re: New mobile devices page (pls. proofread)
by bowerbird＠aol.com 02 Dec '09

02 Dec '09

michael said: > _I_ do, and I do it as part of my demonstrations all the time cool. so you're covered, right? so you won't mind if i help jim, right? because jim wants to do it a different way, and i'm waiting for his feedback on what i suggested, to see if that does the trick for him. because david and greg set out to help jim -- but then they got sidetracked in another direction. now i hope they follow that up, because i'm sure that will help some other people do it _their_ way. but in the meantime, jim was pointing out that his request had been sidetracked, so i was trying to see if i could help him out... i don't really care if there are half-a-million kindles, or 12 million, or 8 dozen. the only important number to me is the number _one_, as in jim came in here as _one_ person, asking for something, and -- if i understand him right -- it should be pretty easy for him to create what he wants, so i'm gonna show him how he can do that. because if he knows how, he might put some elbow grease to it... and yeah, i think it's wonderful that people _can_ read e-books on our cell-phones, and i'm glad that you've advocated that all along... on the other hand, people _are_ reading e-books on their kindles, i know it, for sure, because that's about all you can do on a kindle, and if people are gonna waste their money on a single-functionality e-book-reader-machine, then i _hope_ they can read e-books on it, so i think it is a good use of my energy to try and help jim out here, because then he could spread that functionality to the kindle world, whatever size it happens to be. i'm glad we had this little discussion, michael, because i always believe that i agree with you, even when you seem to think that you disagree with me, which is quite entertaining... -bowerbird p.s. ok, i see that _greg_ wasn't actually sidetracked at all...

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Re: New mobile devices page (pls. proofread)
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 02 Dec '09

02 Dec '09

michael said: > If our page can work on a cellphone, > should be workable on an ereader. um, not really. they don't work the same way. jim, i'd think you can get what you need easily. try this: > http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/23456/pg23456.epub and then try these: > http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/23457/pg23457.epub > http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/23458/pg23458.epub > http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/23459/pg23459.epub > http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/23460/pg23460.epub those are direct links to the .epub versions. for mobi, try these: > http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/23456/pg23456.mobi > http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/23457/pg23457.mobi > http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/23458/pg23458.mobi > http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/23459/pg23459.mobi > http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/23460/pg23460.mobi *** of course, something like this -- where each individual line was linked to the appropriate volume -- would be much more useful: > 23456 -- More Dollies by Richard Hunter (children's poetry) > 23457 -- The Keepsake by Anonymous (children's poetry) > 23458 -- Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Vol 13 > 23459 -- Fishy-Winkle by Jean C. Archer > 23460 -- Abroad by Various (children's poetry) but let's start at the beginning and see how the above works... if i understand you correctly, this is the type of thing you want. -bowerbird

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Re: New mobile devices page (pls. proofread)
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 02 Dec '09

02 Dec '09

jim said: > OK, then I don't know what this is other than a time-wasting joke calm down, jim, it was just al haines jumping into the middle of a discussion when he hadn't read the whole thread, so he had no idea what he was talking about. he does that a lot, but it's no big deal; it's irritating, but it's no big deal. just understand it, and move on. -bowerbird

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Re: New mobile devices page (pls. proofread)
by Greg Newby 01 Dec '09

01 Dec '09

On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 04:56:34PM -0500, David A. Desrosiers wrote: > On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 4:16 PM, Greg Newby <gbnewby(a)pglaf.org> wrote: > > Does this seem like it should be easy? Or, do we need to customize > > for 1000 different devices (literally...according to our pals at > > wattpad.com) > > The correct way is to just apply a stylesheet for mobile devices to > your existing HTML page, and be done with it. You don't even have to > edit the HTML to apply it to all of the sub-html pages you serve from > that vhost if you wish. The main site appears to be running Apache/2, > so that's doable. This sounds easy to mock up. But I plead ignorance as to how a style sheet would do this. I infer you're not talking about user-agent switches (which we do sometimes use in a .htacess file, as well as various URL redirection). > I'd even be willing to expose my Gutenberg mirror as the "mobile site" > and make the necessary adjustments if you wanted to do that. That would be another easy way to test, thanks. > Supporting per-device useragents is a dead-end right from the start; > you'll always be playing a losing game of catch-up the whole way. Definitely. I know some places are doing it that way, but presumably they have content that demands more customization than our relatively simple eBooks. Or maybe they're just gluttons for punishment. > Let me know and we can begin testing out some ideas. It's pretty easy for me to drop in some alternate code at www.gutenberg.org for a variation. I'm definitely interested in how far a good CSS gets us. -- Greg

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phase-change memory
by Michael S. Hart 01 Dec '09

01 Dec '09

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 30 Nov 2009 17:37:36 -0800 From: Greg Newby <gbnewby(a)pglaf.org> To: Michael S. Hart <hart(a)pobox.com>, Michael S. Hart <hart(a)pglaf.org> Subject: phase-change memory I have it on good authority that this will be replacing many instances of flash memory. Samsung is already manufacturing it for cell phones. http://www.eetimessupplynetwork.com/220100470?cid=RSSfeed_eetsn_eetsnRSS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-change_memory /// From Michael Samsung's first announcement of a 512-Mbit phase-change RAM prototype came in September 2006, and only now is the rumor coming out that they are actually in production. This is a great test of comments made earlier this week for the periods between such announcements and actual fact, but you can't actually go out and buy this stuff right now, and if you did, you'd probably be disappointed, as it is only a 512 M. . .BIT. . .not 512 MByte so these won't compete with the flash RAM you've been buying off the shelve for years-- available nearly up to the 512 GIGAbyte level today. In addition, the advantage of the new PRAM chips is mainly, perhaps solely, about a 20% reduction in battery drain. So, if you are comforatable using your computer for 2.5 hrs now, you should be comfortable using it for 3 hrs on PRAM. The question of calendaring such progress remains, as these chips have to work their way through the entire production, testing, integration and finally work their way through the various countries' distribution pipelines to consumers of a Samsung cellphone and then perhaps other brands or purposes such as competing with current flash RAM in the gigabytes. Even if this all happens to the point where the average one of us can walk into a store and buy a USB version of some a year from now, that would be over four years from vaporware to an actual wide scale product, probably closer to five.

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