Jim's EBooks
Jim's EBooks |
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A friend was discussing a project that would involve the low cost electronic publication of texts, and so I started looking at the availability of ebooks. I hit the commercial sites (amazon, barnes and noble) and looked at their selections, and saw the availability of free electronic versions of out-of-copyright books. Since I'm working on my thesis, and constantly saving versions of the text, I wondered how easy it would be to publish in an electronic book format.
That lead to the text-to-reader software, and so I started converting some of my own stuff. Then I wondered how easy it would be to take the text files from Project Gutenberg, and convert them into e-books. So I started writing some code to do the conversion semi-automatically.
Of course the University of Virginia has an extensive ebook library, and if you want to see what the professionals can do, look Here. But my goal is to see just how far I can push the automated conversion software.
In the process of trying to cleanup this program the translates Project Gutenberg text files into MSReader format, I've had to translate a number of texts, and that list is growing. So, since I've got them, I thought I'd hang them where people can use them.
To grab your own copy of these, I recommend right clicking on the link, and saving them to your library. If you don't have an MSREADER you can get one from Here
If I get some spare cash, I might upgrade to the commercial version and add covers, etc.
| Title | Author | Source | Size | Time to Convert | |
| The Republic | Plato | PG:repub11.txt | 484KB | ~6 hours (first one) | |
| Categories | Aristotle | PG:arist10.txt | 118KB | ~2 hours | |
| The Nature of Things | Lucretius | PG:natng10.txt | 250KB | ~4 hours (added poetry flag) | |
| The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes | Authur Conan Doyle | PG:advsh10.txt | 293KB | ~4 Hours (handle single line dialog) | |
| From the Earth to the Moon, and Round the Moon | Jules Verne | PG:moon10a.txt | 282KB | ~1 Hours (handle single hard returns) | |
| Up From Slavery: An Autobiography | Booker T. Washington | PG:slvry10.txt | 231KB | ~40 Minutes (still headaches with headings) |
Also, since the input is text only, there are no images in the books yet. I may add some of the artwork, from the public-domain versions of the texts later.