A few weeks ago, I appended to this forum asking if PG was interested in hosting hand-crafted epubs. Such replies as I received suggested that this was not BAU for PG at the moment. So, although I would rather have offered them to PG, I have just added 6 of these to the MobileRead website. I have retained the PG branding and credited the volunteers who produced the originals - please let me know if you think this is breaking the license terms, I can easily anonymise them. The intention of remastering is simply to make the books easier to read on an inherently limited portable e-reader. (I haven't knowingly made any decisions of taste as I have no ambition to be a book designer or typographer.) The remastering includes: - breaking the xhtml up into smaller files (one per chapter plus one each for front and back matter. - paginating the front and back matter into title page, edition notice, contents, etc. - cleaning up the existing hyperlinks, where necessary. - adding some hyperlinks (at chapter heads)- you might disagree with doing this, I haven't entirely made up my mind myself. - toning down some of the markup (font sizes and margins) to better fit onto the limited size of an e-reader screen. - changing some of the markup to be more scalable and reflowable (usually by expressing font sizes, margins, offsets, etc in what I hope are more scalable units). If you have any comments on whether the remastered books are either more or less readable than the generated originals, please append either to this forum or to the MobileRead threads documented below. I'm particularly interested in what does or doesn't work on particular devices as I have only one device (a Sony Reader) on which to test the books. The books are: - The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall - PG969 - Anne Bronte - - http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=122349 - Almayer's Folly - PG720 - Joseph Conrad - - http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=122348 - The Portrait Of A Lady - PG2833 & PG2834 - Henry James - - http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=122346 - The History Of Henry Esmond - PG2511 - William Makepeace Thackeray - - http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=122345 - The Belton Estate - PG4969 - Anthony Trollope - - http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=119515 - Ayala's Angel - PG33500 - Anthony Trollope - - http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=122337 (I also have 3 other books I've worked on: - Persuasion - Jane Austen - The Forsyte Saga complete - John Galsworthy - The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas pere but I haven't added them to MobileRead because there are already versions of the books there.) Bob Gibbins
On 2/21/2011 2:54 AM, Robert Gibbins wrote: [snip]
- toning down some of the markup (font sizes and margins) to better fit onto the limited size of an e-reader screen. - changing some of the markup to be more scalable and reflowable (usually by expressing font sizes, margins, offsets, etc in what I hope are more scalable units).
I have not had the opportunity yet to look at these e-books, but I would offer a general comment. All of the e-book User Agents I am familiar with (which does not include the Sony reader) have the capability to set font sizes, and margins as part of the general setup of the reader. Because these metrics are generally a matter of personal preference among users, and can vary widely, I would recommend removing all specifications of these metrics from your hand-crafted e-pubs.
I think it would be a good idea if PG supported hand-generated epub, mobi, and if PG would allow volunteers to easily offer-up hand-generated HTML of existing PG catalog items that do not yet have hand-generated HTML. As this example shows, when PG doesn't offer these [obvious] choices it simply forces would-be PG volunteers to post their efforts elsewhere, thereby diluting the usefulness of PG efforts -- because if a reader wants to find a hand-generated epub, mobi, or even frequently a hand-generated HTML for PG library offerings they have to go search places other than PG to find those versions! And in turn, those other posting sites are even less likely than PG to post "bug fixing" updates to those efforts, again, diluting PG efforts....
A few weeks ago, I appended to this forum asking if PG was interested in hosting hand-crafted epubs....
On 02/27/2011 10:12 PM, Jim Adcock wrote:
I think it would be a good idea if PG supported hand-generated epub, mobi, and if PG would allow volunteers to easily offer-up hand-generated HTML of existing PG catalog items that do not yet have hand-generated HTML.
Yes! Yes! As we already don't have a usable HTML archive but a pile of incompatible HTML trash because everybody has thrown in his own personal misconception of HTML markup, lets compound the status quo by adding a plethora of diverse idiosyncratic epubs and mobis all made to everybodies different personal aestethic tastes and markup prejudices and all having a slightly inconsistent set of bugs and quirks. The sites that are most successful at republishing PG books, feedbooks.com and manybooks.net are both using our plain text format instead of our HTML. They sure know why. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org
The sites that are most successful at republishing PG books, feedbooks.com and manybooks.net are both using our plain text format instead of our HTML.
What feedbooks.com and manybooks.net republish is crap -- but I guess I'm not sure whether that supports Marcello's argument or mine. It certainly points out there must be *something* wrong with what PG is doing when feedbooks.com and manybooks.net choose to republish html, epub, and mobi file formats based on txt70 -- downloads that are most of the time clearly and obviously inferior to that PG offers directly from its own site -- and yet people continue to download from feedbooks.com and manybooks.net! Certainly feedbooks.com and manybooks.net do a better job of "advertising" their offerings -- and make them somewhat easier to download, on average, to a large variety of different devices. Another advantage of feedbooks.com and manybooks.net is that they remove the unnecessarily unsightly and scary -- to the naïve user -- PG legalize from the front of their downloads.
I would imagine that "easier to find and download" and "good enough to read" is going to trump "harder to find and download" and "looks prettier" for most people.
participants (5)
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don kretz -
Jim Adcock -
Lee Passey -
Marcello Perathoner -
Robert Gibbins