‘Huck’ without DRM shackles–and other goodies from Planet PDF
While I loathe Adobe PDF for e-books, I love Planet PDF, an independent Web site devoted to the format. If I were Adobe, I’d fire the whole PR department and replace ‘em with the Planet’s chief inhabitants.
In character, Planet Editor Kurt Foss just emailed me the following:
Thanks for the recent Teleread references to several of our recent news items at Planet PDF. Wanted to let you know that I’ve long shared your disgust over the way some eBook publishers have chosen to apply permissions restrictions to public domain books.If you’d like a version of Huck Finn in PDF–but not secured with the Adobe Content Server, and thus no such restrictions–we have been building up a collection of freebies on our site.
The other 35 unencumbered books range from A Tale of Two Cities to The Red Badge of Courage and The Time Machine.
I sampled The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and found that the crew at Planet PDF had done a beautiful job. Mark Twain, aka Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who mastered the art of printing and who as a gung-ho typewriter user was a 19th-century gadget freak, would have been pleased.
Granted, I myself would prefer an ASCII version, which looks great when viewed in the customized format for which I’ve set up the Tiny eBook Reader program. A Zip file, digestible by Tiny Reader, comes in at 221K (578K uncompressed), compared to 880K for the untagged Adobe version from the Planet (for desktops) and 1.3MB for the tagged version (for PDAs).
Just the same, I commend Planet PDF for doing better than the control-minded greedsters at Adobe and caring about the availability of public domain classics without DRM restrictions. Can a book be like a human? Then let us remember one of Tom Sawyer’s lines in Huck Finn, spoken about “Nigger Jim”: “Turn him loose! he ain’t no slave; he’s as free as any cretur that walks this earth!”
Interesting but hardly surprising detail: Planet PDF is based in Australia.
Update, August 3: Kurt has emailed me: “Just a point of interest: the bulk of the Planet PDF staff is indeed based in Melbourne, Australia; but I am based in the US (Madison, WI), and most editorial content is generated by me. The eBooks are, however, produced in Melbourne by my colleague Richard Crocker. So Rich deserves all the credit regarding our growing eBooks collection. I’m actually in Melbourne right now and for the next couple weeks.”
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