However, I broke down and let a friend register it because I wanted SOOO badly to try out Jim Adcock's "gutmagic" at http://bit.ly/gutmagic
Just as my own personal comment, I think Mr. Adcock's program should be the very first thing anyone tries out on their Kindle, and I would LOVE to see versions for nook, Kobo, iPad, iPhone, iPod, Sony, etc., etc., etc!
Well, FWIW nook, Kobo, iPad, iPhone, iPod, Sony etc should be happy reading the EPUB version which I posted right next to the MOBI version. Whether it "works" on any of these devices however, depends entirely on the manufacturer of a particular device and whether or not they have implemented anything on their device that *prevents* "Magic Catalog" from working on that device. It does "work" on ADE on a desktop computer, for example. But, in any case, thanks for the kind words, and let me give you a brief "history" of "Magic Catalog" and then it should be "obvious" what "PG" [whoever that is] could do to help support it. I had created this site a couple years ago called freekindlebooks.org after "PG" [whoever that is] refused to let me use the PG site to upload mobi formatted versions of the PG files, and I was predicting that Kindle would be a very popular device, and a good device to use to read PG books on. PG at the time had "Anointing King" a format called "Plucker" which I couldn't see there being much future for. I had discovered, to my pleasant surprise, a day or two after buying one of the first Kindles that Amazon, much to my surprise, had NOT locked out the ability to directly download MOBI files using the Kindle's web browser [pretty much "every" mobile device manufacturer since Kindle has locked out this ability, for pretty obvious reasons.] But the very weak Kindle browser didn't much like the awkward frames-based PG website design of the time, making it virtually impossible for the average user to download directly from the PG website [the brain-dead-simple HTML format of freekindlebooks.org was designed to be Kindle 1.0 friendly]. I had downloaded the PG content using the custom DVD generation software, so I put together a hack program to join together author/title names to PG file locations -- a capability that I haven't found a trivial way to do yet, and to include illustrated vs. non-illustrated version of the files, and to exclude copyrighted works [because I just didn't want to mess with *that* issue] I left the files sorted by PG submission order, because, frankly, the more popular works were done years ago, and because I think that casual linear browsing is frankly more fun for most people ["ooh, there's a book on logging in 1882, I've never read anything like that"] than having to search on author/title which assumes one even knows the author/title one is interested in. Unfortunately "Magic Catalog" has to ignore the PG requests to direct users to the PG "landing sites" because PG insists on displaying multiple file formats on one page, and those pages, once again [*sigh*] insist on using HTML frames. Also "Magic Catalog" was a once-off hack that I generated one-time only back a couple years ago -- which tells you something about including all PG content [not that anyone is actually going to browse thru all 35,000 titles anyway...] So, here's some suggestions: First, I am perfectly happy if PG wants to "host" "as their own" the existing "Magic Catalog"'s, since it is basically just based on PG catalog information. I can probably find the existing HTML "source code" for the it if you prefer. The only thing "magic" about it is how much easier it makes it to download books onto a Kindle or a non-locked-down EPUB device -- as you have discovered. The current software I used to generate "Magic Catalog" is super-hack one-off so that won't do you any good. If you were to make it easy somehow to take a PG book# and get title/author info and file location from that book# then it would be easy to generate this "Magic Catalog" The catalog ought to be updated relatively frequently to include new content. You really ought to be hosting this yourself, which you are welcome to do. You really ought to support simple, frameless, one-file-format "landing sites" -- which include "how to donate" info at the bottom -- so that things like "Magic Catalog" can target a PG-friendly landing site, and you can get credit -- and donations -- where credit and donations are due. You really ought to support, both in your version of "Magic Catalog", and your website in general, more fun and interesting ways to find books, rather than the current author/title method -- perhaps including a simple book# linear scroll like Magic Catalog uses, and perhaps an "I feel lucky" option. Cheers, and let me know what I can do to help [without having to get up off my butt -- as my brother-in-law likes to say!]