Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

Category: eBooks

  • Ebook lag

    So yes, I know I’ve been way behind on the Palm ebooks lately. I’ve got a bunch queued up to convert but just haven’t had the time or energy lately to do so. But here’s a taste of what I have in the hopper:

    • De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America
    • Sherlock Holmes
    • The Canterbury Tales
    • James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer and The Last of the Mohicans
    • Grimm’s Fairy Tales
    • Moby Dick
    • The Story of Mankind from Hendrik van Loon

    So, I’m getting there. I figure by posting this and including this gratuitous plug for free Palm Reader ebooks I’ll get more motivated to do them.

  • The Scottish Play

    I just uploaded the Palm Reader file for Macbeth to the ebooks page, and holy crap, I forgot how messed up that play is until I was converting it. Shakespeare must have been in a very, very dark mood when he was writing it. Enjoy.

  • Gradual

    Obviously I’ve not been very motivated to write much lately. I’m up to my elbows in Cryptonomicon and loving it, so that’s been eating up much of my free time. But today I updated several parts of the site, most notably the ebooks page, where I’m rolling out a better layout and feature set for people viewing the free ebooks. It’s time for it; my ebooks page is by far the most popular page on this site and most of the site searches are for ebooks, but the search function looks at the blog content only.

  • New Cory Doctorow Ebooks

    I’ve just added six new Palm Reader ebooks to my ebooks page that are really short stories from Cory Doctorow’s new book, A Place So Foreign and Eight More.

    There’s still one more short story I need to convert, and then I’ll combine them all into one big book download. Enjoy. And thank Cory!

  • New Ebooks!

    On my ebooks page I’ve just linked up two new, modern Palm Reader ebooks by Rob Callahan, who is generously offering these up for free (under the Creative Commons license) on his site, and was nice enough to email me to let me know. Awesome! The more there are current books that can be freely downloaded (like what Cory Doctorow is also doing), the more everybody benefits.

  • Some Items.

    Item 1. My in-laws are in town, from today until Sunday. This always causes some tension around here, as my wife doesn’t get along very well with her parents, but the kids just love them, so all’s well. Plus, they’ll watch the kids one night so we can finally go see The Matrix Reloaded.

    Item 2. The free ebooks section of my site here is definitely generating traffic; I get more hits from search engines (mostly Google and MSN) to this page than anywhere else on the site. I’ve also noticed some hits coming in from Google to the page with my PHP porter stemming algorithm.

    Item 3. Never, ever watch the movie SwimFan.

    Item 4. I’m writing up a long, geeky rant on comic books to post here sometime soon. If you’re into comics, keep an eye out. If not, no worries.

    Item 5. I actually can’t think of an “Item 5,” so that’s all, folks.

  • Site Updates

    I’ve been busy on this site the last few days with updates and revisions. To wit:

    1. Got the search feature working (finally). This is using MySQL’s built-in FULLTEXT indexing capabilities; it’s pretty slick, the first time I’ve played with it. It does natural language searches using frequency of keywords to produce relevancy scores… if you understood that, drop me a line because you’re as big a geek as I am…
    2. I’ve been adding new ebooks for the Palm Reader. I finally buckled down and loaded the Dropbook software on the new machine at home, and hacked up a PHP command-line script to do almost all of the work in converting Project Gutenburg texts to PML format. Now I can crank out several ebooks a day.
    3. Added the “Word Stemmer” item to the list of projects on the right. It’s a PHP class I wrote myself available for download; I’ll be putting more up there as I get them prettied up, code-wise.

    There’s been several other tweaks I’ve been doing behind the scenes, too. Nothing overt, but stuff to make things (hopefully) run more smoothly.

  • Moving right along…

    A few random things.

    php|architect is offering a free issue of their new magazine. Anyone who’s into PHP should check this out.

    I found a neat site today called StoryMania. From their own description, they’re an “online community and marketplace for publishing, discovering, reviewing, buying and selling creative works — interact directly with authors and other viewers.” The site could use some technical improvements, but I like the idea a lot.

    So far I’ve got the first five chapters of Tom Sawyer done in Palm Reader format (.pml). It’s pretty plain, so I’ll be calling it version 1.0 and try to get my hands on the actual book to address additional formatting issues.

  • Palm Reader eBooks

    I’ve been merrily playing with the Sony CLIÉ that I got for my birthday, installing apps and loading it up with data, and one of my bright ideas is to start playing around with eBooks. See, the CLIÉ runs the PalmOS, for which there is a really nifty free eBook Palm Reader available from Palm Digital Media. Palm Digital Media also offers a fairly extensive catalog of eBooks for sale (and a few for free); think Amazon of Palm eBooks.

    I downloaded two of the free eBooks, The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling, and The Coming Technological Singularity by Vernor Vinge, and I read the Vinge work while in Las Vegas.

    But the cool thing— the really cool thing— is that Palm Digital Media provides you with the software and the means to create your own eBooks for the Palm Reader.

    So what I’m thinking is that there’s a real dearth of free eBooks out there—aside from the two I mention above, about the only other free books I found are texts from the Bible. Yet with the software to make books, and the wealth of content available from sites like Project Gutenburg, I don’t see any reason why there shouldn’t be a lot more free eBooks for Palm.

    You can probably see where this is going.

    My bright idea relating to this is to start creating Palm Reader eBooks (from works in the public domain), and offering them for download from this site. And then distributing them accordingly. For free.

    Because it just seems like a neat thing to do.

    The first books I plan to convert, I think, will be Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (and then Huck Finn), and The Time Machine by H.G. Wells.

    But then, you know… the sky’s the limit. Any particular book you’d like to see? How many people out there are using Palm-compatible PDA’s, anyway? And how many would read eBooks on them? Email me with answers to these questions, or any other ideas for Palm books.