TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Munseys’ Category

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 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.