Comments on: 25,000+ free Project Gutenberg books: An easy way to read ‘em on your iPhone—everything from ancient classics to Sherlock Holmes and modern SF http://www.teleread.org/2009/02/18/25000-free-project-gutenberg-books-an-easy-way-to-read-em-on-your-iphone-or-ipod-touch-everything-from-ancient-classics-to-sherlock-holmes-and-modern-sf/ News & views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics Sun, 22 Nov 2009 18:57:10 -0500 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 hourly 1 By: pstjmack http://www.teleread.org/2009/02/18/25000-free-project-gutenberg-books-an-easy-way-to-read-em-on-your-iphone-or-ipod-touch-everything-from-ancient-classics-to-sherlock-holmes-and-modern-sf/comment-page-1/#comment-1013660 pstjmack Thu, 19 Feb 2009 06:53:24 +0000 http://www.teleread.org/2009/02/18/25000-free-project-gutenberg-books-an-easy-way-to-read-em-on-your-iphone-or-ipod-touch-everything-from-ancient-classics-to-sherlock-holmes-and-modern-sf/#comment-1013660 I'm surprised you find this a big deal - the Manybooks site on the download site list for eReader has almost every Gutenberg title available, and the BookZ reader also links directly to Gutenberg. But this just highlights one key drawback with Gutenberg for all the ereaders for me - they can't format poetry properly! When I download classic poetry in eReader or ePub format, most of the time the result is an unreadable mess - no proper line spacing, no separation between verses, sometimes no separation between poems. So far no ebook program has managed to fix this - I don't know if the fault is Gutenberg's, but I guess it is, since it's the same fault across multiple readers, and both eReader and Stanza can display poems perfectly well. I'm having to remake by hand almost every file I download from Gutenberg, and it's a pain, so I wish they would - line breaks are pretty elementary! I’m surprised you find this a big deal – the Manybooks site on the download site list for eReader has almost every Gutenberg title available, and the BookZ reader also links directly to Gutenberg.

But this just highlights one key drawback with Gutenberg for all the ereaders for me – they can’t format poetry properly! When I download classic poetry in eReader or ePub format, most of the time the result is an unreadable mess – no proper line spacing, no separation between verses, sometimes no separation between poems.

So far no ebook program has managed to fix this – I don’t know if the fault is Gutenberg’s, but I guess it is, since it’s the same fault across multiple readers, and both eReader and Stanza can display poems perfectly well. I’m having to remake by hand almost every file I download from Gutenberg, and it’s a pain, so I wish they would – line breaks are pretty elementary!

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