Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Many PD books in new e-book format

Mike Cook, EPUB books now available at Project Gutenberg, Project Gutenberg News, March 20, 2009. (Thanks to ResourceShelf.)

... Project Guternberg now has most of their titles available in the industry standard EPUB eBook format and free from any DRM (Digital Restrictions Management)!

Although only embraced as an eBook standard within the last 12 months, it has been truly embraced by many big names including; Sony, Google, Penguin, Harper Collins and Adobe, to name but a few. There are also many EPUB readers, both software and hardware, that can read eBooks in this format. ...

It must be stated that at this time, the PG EPUB books should be considered experimental. It is a huge task to convert the entire PG collection, so many may be either buggy or not actually work at all.

The EPUB files are generated automatically from the HTML version, if there is one, otherwise the Plain Text file is used. In this case the conversion program must guess at the structure of the text, so it is more than likely that the EPUB book will contain some formatting errors. These can include verse lines running together or paragraphs being marked as headers. Still, they are very readable. ...

See also Peter's recent post on public domain titles from Google Book Search being made available for the Sony Reader.