Musings of a Babylon Lurker

Ebooks – Self Made

Sunday, September 18th, 2011 | linux, technology, writing | No Comments

I have written some articles for a Danish science fiction magazine.

Since I have an e-reader I would like to have those available to bring with me.
For an article the process is very simple :
I take the text version of the file and add some headline tags (Simple HTML), make some paragraph markups .
Things come up very readable, and I used a neat text editor for the Mac called “TextWrangler” The editor “understands” Regular Expressions, a hairy Unix way of doing text editing, but I just had to learn a bit of it to do this.

Neat to get my own stuff on the e-reader. I may put more of my stuff on it.

Tags: ebooks, linux, technology

eBook reading on the iPod Touch

Saturday, November 29th, 2008 | books, technology | 4 Comments

Yes – the 2.0 software for the iPod Touch allows (finally !) 3rd party software to be installed, making the Touch a more versatile piece of equipment than just a browser and audio/video player. Suddenly it becomes more of a PDA.

I downloaded the Stanza ebook reader to the Touch. It allows downloads of free ebooks from project Gutenberg. I downloaded a few, and got to read one for now. Having watched the “Jekyll” miniseries on DVD I got curious and wanted to (re)read the story giving the inspiration for the series – the short story “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Also I downloaded a few ebooks that come as applications for the Touch. Mike Stackpole has a few there, mostly short stories, but his novel “One a Hero” is there as well.

I have read a bit of those as well.

The small screen of the Touch is not really ideal for the purpose, but if you go travelling and want to travel “light” it is an option for having a set of books with you. It is easy to adjust the font size for relatively comfortable reading. Just don’t expect to read a novel in one go on the iPod Touch.

Tags: ebooks, ipod touch

Project Gutenberg.

Saturday, November 22nd, 2008 | books | No Comments

If you are looking for legal and free eBooks with the copyright expired, take a look at Project Gutenberg.

The Gutenberg is working on collecting all texts out of copyright, they have more than 25.000 ebooks in the library. They can be downloaded individually, or in collections as DVD or CD-ROM images.They can be found here.

The DVD from July 2007 has about 17.000 titles, most of what was completed at the time.

For SciFi fans there is a CD-ROM for download. Look at the link above.As far as I know there is *some* modern SciFi stories from people like Cory Doctorow who have released them under a Creative Commons License.Most of the titles, however, are more than 70 years old. One story that I actually downloaded and read on my iPod Touch was Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Strange Case of Dr.Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”. Having seen the BBC series by Steven Moffat I wanted to read the original story and downloaded and read it.

So, if you are looking for classic old stories, go there. You can most likely find it.

Tags: ebooks, Gutenberg