The automation is easy when you have your books marked up in a nice structured format such as XML, but PG doesn’t – and basically refuses to do so.

I’ve written a Perl script to convert PG ASCII to TEI XML, but as the original PG files are vastly inconsistent there is always some manual work needed, which of course slows down the whole process.

I’m currently working to setup epubbooks.com to provide converted PG books in the ePub format, which will have all the niceties of well formatted chapter headings, linked footnotes, and so forth. Once the site is live I can then concentrate on pushing up the size of the catalogue.

As soon as ‘conversion’ becomes the core task I will be able to pump out new books (excluding ones with images) at 2-10 minutes per book. As I spend more time in this process, I should be able to fine tune the script and reduce the amount of manual work needed.

Things will improve once you can log in to Feedbooks from Stanza too.

The latest version of Calibre includes the command line tool any2epub. Supported input formats are: [‘html’, ‘rar’, ‘zip’, ‘fb2’, ‘mobi’, ‘prc’, ‘lit’, ‘rtf’, ‘pdf’, ‘txt’]. As these converters (any2epub, comic2epub and feeds2epub) mature, they will be integrated in to the GUI.

My goal with Feedbooks is to provide a platform where anyone can contribute to this ask and easily add public domain books. The average book takes 10-15mn to add to Feedbooks, and once it’s online it’s available in every format supported by Feedbooks. It’s also constantly upgraded to provide an optimal output.

I also believe that the current problem with public domain books isn’t the size of the catalog: it’s how you can browse the catalog and get recommendations. There’s a lot of books that will never be popular on PG for this reason: it lacks this sort of things. I’ll be working on this too…

That said, the ability to read/buy secure ereader WAS one of the deciding factors in my purchase of the iPod Touch. I love the internet freebies for their sheer quantity and availability, and knowing there will always be something to read. But more and more, I am finding that I *am* willing to pay a fair price for an e-version (so long as it is not *so* protected that I can’t be assured of its future readability. In fact, for certain types of books, it can be better for me in the long run because without the e option, I would just get a used paperback and sell it to the used bookstore when I am done. eBooks are such a breeze to store (again, so long as they are not so DRM-ed that one can’t be sure of their future readability, which was my difficulty with the ebookwise) that I don’t have to get rid of them. I can keep them forever.

I still think plain text or unencrypted DRM is the better way. But I am heartened to hear of so many readers with large e collections dating back many years. And even if 20 years from now they do go bust, I’ll still have had them for longer than I would a read-and-sell paperback version. I have my price point though. I will not pay hardcover prices for an e-book!

Hi, Paul. Stay tuned for interesting things out of Feedbooks, even if it’s online rather than local.

Meanwhile, yes, I agree with your analysis of the complications here, including the numbers issue. But consider how far ePub come from a year ago! Single-handedly Hadrien has made immense changes even if he isn’t at the PG level yet. And now the iPhone is here as an e-book platform, Android is on the way, and Stanza exists and uses ePub as a native format!

Thanks,
David

The deal is again the cash flow 300.000 downloads at lets say USD 15.- means a revenue of USD 4.5m borders avrenge something like USD 250m a month. I don’t have the faintest clue to what the general ebook total is, I wouldn’t be surprised is as for public domain the real market exist outside of the walled gardens of Apple and Amazon.

Statistics can be deceptive if you dont have a solid refference frame and in this field we dont. The numbers only tell that there might be a real profit it dont tell us that the iphone is the future of ebooks.

As of the end of August eReader had been installed on just under a quarter million iPhone/iPod touch devices. Over 300,000 ebooks have been downloaded onto the iPhone/iTouch platforms from our store, and that does not include downloads of free books from places like Manybooks.com (for privacy reasons we don’t track anything about what people do from the app if it does not involve our own stores).

Add in Stanza, bookshelf, and other iphone ebook offerings and it is abundantly clear that many more people are reading on the Apple devices than Kindle. There really is not even a question about it anymore. iPhone/iTouch required only about 90 days to exceed even the stratospheric end of the estimates for Kindle that Amazon themselves said were “extremely high”.

This is not to say that Kindle won’t be an important niche player going forward. Choice is what it’s all about. Consumers who can afford a dedicated stand-alone device have a lot of options now including Kindle, and Kindle may get the lion’s share of those high-end consumers even with the many new e-ink offerings that are launching in the next few quarters.

It’s just that there will always be many times as many consumers who find the iPhone screen “big enough” and can’t justify the extra expense of a stand-alone device. There’s just no overcoming that simple fact.

The real story in 2009 will be iPhone vs. Android. iPhone vs. Kindle is a settled question.

-Steve P.

Here’s a few other popular apps to compare (I’m listing apps that are constantly in the top, not for example games that usually end up in the first spots but just for a few weeks):

#15 Shazam
#17 Flashlight
#21 Remote
#22 Facebook
…
#34 Tap Tap Revenge
#37 Palringo
#40 Brain Tuner

So, Stanza is between Tap Tap Revenge and Facebook’s popularity.