TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘mobileread’ Category

By Chris Meadows

A few days ago, I mentioned that Jeffrey A. Carver had posted the first novel in his Chaos Chronicles series, Neptune Crossing, on his web site as a free e-book. I also mentioned that his plans included making all three of the novels currently in that series similarly available, to build publicity for the publication of the fourth. The second novel in the series, Strange Attractors, has now been posted to Carver’s download page—but that is not all.

When Carver posted the first novel, someone started a thread in the Mobileread freebies forum about it, and shortly afterward Carver himself joined in. Before long, a number of Mobileread forum regulars had volunteered to convert the book into other formats for him. As a result, both books are currently available in html, MobiPocket, eReader, RTF, PDF, LRF, LIT, and ePub formats. (There is now another Mobileread thread about Strange Attractors as well.)

And as it happens, I was one of those volunteers: I polished the markup of the eReader version. I took the raw output of a Word-to-eReader script, then went in and reformatted it for better readability—adding chapter headers (and thus a table of contents), “smart” quotation marks, the cover illustration, and so on. I did this for both Neptune Crossing and Strange Attractors, and will be doing it for The Infinite Sea as well.

Carver has lately revealed that he has come to an agreement with Tor to publish the fourth book in the series, The Sunborn, as a Tor e-book through their arrangement with Baen (though he retains the option to give it away for free, as well).

Even speaking as one of them, it is great to see so many Mobileread regulars willing to volunteer their time and effort to help authors convert their works to as many formats as possible. Some posters in the threads have suggested that Mobileread could be promoted as a resource for other authors looking to do the same thing.

By David Rothman

"Inspired by the ingenious Feedbooks Kindle Download Guide, we’ve decided to launch a similar feature allowing everyone with an Amazon Kindle, iRex iLiad or other Mobipocket-compatible e-book reader with access to the Internet to immediately download books prepared and uploaded by our members." - Alex at MR.

The TeleRead take: Congrats, guys! Can’t wait for a version for the Astak machines.

By Paul Biba

Here is a photo taken of a WOWIO PDF as it is displayed on my Sony Reader. Since the text doesn’t re-flow, you can see that it is almost unreadable. As a matter of fact, it is not almost unreadable, it is indeed unreadable.

Now here is that same PDF after it has been processed with a piece of free Windows software called pdflrf. As you can see the text is now readable.

pdflrf is available from the MobileRead forums and can be found here. It is now at version 0.7 and the zip file you will download has both a command line and Windows GUI version.

I also downloaded one of the Japanese fairy tale books from the Internet Archive in a black and white PDF format (as the Sony Reader does not display color). When loaded to the Sony Reader the PDF file produced only solid black pages. I then ran the original PDF through pdflrf and it produced a perfectly formatted file with all the illustrations intact.

This is a wonderful tool for any Sony Reader owner and many thank must go to MobileRead and the author for providing this free of charge.

Related: How to read e-books on (almost) any phone, from MobileRead.

By Deena Fisher

Everyone knows that POD means vanity press, right? Say that to any reputable indie publisher and you just might end up with a black eye.

I’m holding a trade paperback POD in my right hand—well, I put it down to type, but I had it in my hand; and it looks to me indistinguishable from the offset printed book I had in my left hand except for the price, which is about a dollar higher. I’m sure that’s a red flag for some right there, but bear with me.

The same book, published electronically, sells for half the retail price online, a significant difference. That’s not always the case. Purchase an e-book copy of a hardback bestseller still on the NY Times list and you’re going to pay the same price.

The P/E price mystery

Why? Just why is an e-book the same price as a hardback? I was first annoyed and then amused when I read a comment posted to Engadget’s recent report about Amazon’s Kindle. The gist of it was: (more…)