TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Manybooks.net’ Category

By David Rothman

What if you could age backwards?

That’s the premise of an F. Scott Fitzgerald story that helped inspire a just-released movie of the same name—The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Actually there could be a little more to to the origins of the movie than that, if some fans of The Confessions of Max Tivoli, Andrew Sean Greer’s novel, are right.

For the freebie…

You can download the Fitzgerald story at Manybooks.net and Feedbooks.net in a variety of formats, including ePub.

What’s new at Manybooks.net: Matt McClintock has been using Calibre to generate ePub, though he reports that he’s had some reliability problems when using it in an automated system. Maybe Kovid Goyal or another Calibre developer can pitch in to help Matt, who loves the program when it’s working (my suggestion).

By David Rothman

Sci-fi, fantasy and public domain works are more in keeping with the tastes of typical TeleBlog readers than a Washington newspaper novel might be. Same over at many other places on the Net.

Excerpts from The Solomon Scandals, however, are #2 on Feedbooks’ list of “shared” items in the English language, even if we’re not talking huge numbers here. Hey, my fifteen minutes. Yes, anybody can upload to Feedbooks’ “shared” section,” and it’s one way to spread around your own excerpts.

#1 is The Man Who Could Not Forget, a short story by Michael Graeme—a tasty mix of the speculative and romance genres.

Coming up today or tomorrow: The latest at Manybooks.net.

By Paul Biba

After writing the post below I got to thinking about the sentence I used: … volunteer work like this should be recognized every once in a while. It is really incredible how the e-book community is supported by a cadre of volunteers who seem to want to do nothing but make the reading world better. Some of these sites may be looking for investors or hope to turn into a business some day, but as of today they are free to the public. Here are a few that come to mind quickly. I apologize to those I have left out and I hope our readers will mention them in comments to this post.

Feedbooks

Manybooks

Munseys

Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg of Australia

Project Gutenberg of Germany

Project Gutenberg Europe

Distributed Proofreading Europe

Project Runeberg

Distributed Proofreaders

Book Glutton

mobileread

By the way, if anyone reading this has NOT proofread a book for Gutenberg through Distributed Proofreaders, why not make a New Year’s resolution to do so. I’ve done a couple and it’s great fun. You can pick the book you are interested in and do as much, or as little, as you want. Well worth your time and effort.

By Chris Meadows

We are approaching one of the two times of the year when many people who do not ordinarily attend church nonetheless get up and take themselves in. It seems appropriate, therefore, to look at a few options for e-books to use in church. It should go without saying that a book the size of the Bible is one of the best arguments for having an electronic version that you can keep in your hip pocket.

There have been previous attempts to create such a Bible, of course, such as the Franklin NIV-570 electronic NIV Bible pictured at left and its King James sibling. But in the age of the e-book device and the iPhone, we can do better than that—and at $42-$50, we can certainly do it for less money.

First, I will cover true “e-books”—books that you download entirely to your device and can take with you anywhere. Then I will look at a couple of useful multiple-Bible-version websites.

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By Chris Meadows

Ars Technica has an interesting review of a forthcoming iPhone e-book app called Classics.

Not yet available on the App Store, the gimmick of Classics is that it attempts to replicate the page-turning experience of a “real book” as closely as is possible on the iPhone’s screen. For $2.99, it will launch with a library of 12 public-domain titles, such as Alice in Wonderland or 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, with the possibility of adding more with later updates.

Without actually trying the app out, I cannot agree or disagree with the specific points Ars makes in its review. Nonetheless, I have to wonder if a nifty page-turning animation will really be sufficient to make readers pay even $2.99 for public-domain books that can be downloaded for eReader or Stanza from Manybooks or Feedbooks for free.

By Paul Biba

How to find what books to read? That’s always a problem. Well, the Manybooks site has an excellent aid to help solve this problem.

If you go to the site and, over on the right, click on RSS feeds, and then click on New Titles Sorted by Category, you will be taken to a page with 56 different categories of books. Each one of these links is an RSS feed for that category. Your reader, I use Bloglines, will pop up a feed whenever a new book is added to that category. It works like a charm.

By Paul Biba

The Kindle includes an experimental web browser so I thought I’d see how it worked with some of the public domain sites I frequent.

Feedbooks: as we know Feedbooks works just fine in the Kindle. We have an earlier posting giving a “how to” about using the downloadable Feedbooks catalog.  There is also a mobile site for Feedbooks.  The mobile site has all sorts of ways to sort and browse everything, you can even access your customized recommandations (based on your previous downloads to guess your taste).

Manybooks: much to my pleasure Manybooks also works just fine on the Kindle browser. The picture you see above is of the Manybooks site. I have selected and downloaded several books from Manybooks and they read just fine.

Munseys: does not work. The site displays OK, but I am unable to select any of the action buttons. Munseys has a Kindle site that works  well, but the organization is not as good as the other sites mentioned here.

Gutenberg: can be made to work, but is a real pain in the neck and probably isn’t worth the effort since we have several other excellent sites working. Also, the downloaded book, in txt format, shows strange line breaks and pagination, making the extensive effort needed to get a book not worthwhile in the end.

Mobileread:  Mobipocket books can be downloaded either from the mobile site directly or from a catalog kept on your Kindle, just like the Feedbooks catalog.  Both methods work just fine, but of course the catalog method is much easier.

If anyone has a site they’d like me to try out, please ask in the comments.

Thanks to all who have made comments I’ve incorporated all the comments so that they can be referenced in one place.

By David Rothman

Manybooks.net, as we know, is back up with thousands of public domain and Creative Common titles—in scads of formats for devices ranging from the iPhone to the Kindle and Sony Reader

But why did the site go down in the first place? Matt McClintock, a real pro whom I’d trust, believes that hackers accidentally attacked him rather than another target. The lowdown:

"It turned out to be a DDoS attack. Don’t know who or why, but my guess is that it was a goof on the attacker’s part; they just mistyped an IP address and mistakenly flooded my server instead of the Georgian embassy or something. Anyway, it gave me the opportunity to learn a bit more about firewalls and apache modules before the flood suddenly stopped Monday morning. A little mopping up and everything is back to the way it was."