Downloading poetry as e-books
By Robert Nagle
I spent Sunday downloading lots of PG texts and converting things into the e-book format of choice at the moment (Mobipocket). A month ago my eBookwise broke, so I had to redownload everything into a usable format. I encountered some difficulties with manybooks files (see my earlier post about Manybooks vs. Project Gutenberg).
Poetry poses unique challenges. Sometimes the ASCII text files of PG destroys the stanzas and indents; sometimes the small size of the PDA breaks lines which shouldn’t be broken (This happens even with the more recent html versions being produced by PG).
I recently found out about the American Verse Project which, in addition to having several complete poetry collections, lets you view a book as a single web page. That’s the key thing for easy e-book conversion. I was now easily able to download poetry by Carl Sandburg, Phillip Freneau, Phyllis Wheatley (pictured above), Vachel Lindsay and others. The key is making sure to click the View Complete Text on the right side of the page. (This is all courtesy of the power of TEI).
Two lingering concerns/suggestions. First, I wish these book as html pages could include a hyperlinked table of contents. That makes it easier for the user to browse pages. Mobipocket has generally been pretty good about preserving the links on a single page html file; not so good when it derives from multiple html files.
Second, although I recognize that these digitalization tasks are often underfunded and understaffed, but I’d like to see more collections by poets who didn’t have a chance to publish their verse books until after 1922 (even though they may have published poems separately in magazines before 1923). These uncollected works are in the public domain, but they aren’t often collected into usable digital packages. That includes T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg and several more.
Now’s a great time to follow poetry. Mobile devices make it easier to read short pieces on the run. Podcasts like Harry Lafnear’s Everyday Muse make it easy to gain an audience. Blogs (like Silliman’s Blog) make it easier to learn about wonderful poetry and essays about poetry. Historic recording sites like archive.org and Penn Sound give you access to all kinds of voices. There are still some surprises; here’s audio files available of Walt Whitman reading his poems .
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