Comments on: 25,000+ free Project Gutenberg books: An easy way to read ‘em on your iPhone—everything from ancient classics to Sherlock Holmes and modern SF http://www.teleread.com/ebooks/25000-free-project-gutenberg-books-an-easy-way-to-read-em-on-your-iphone-or-ipod-touch-everything-from-ancient-classics-to-sherlock-holmes-and-modern-sf/ News & views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics Wed, 15 Feb 2012 22:44:15 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 By: Branko Collin http://www.teleread.com/ebooks/25000-free-project-gutenberg-books-an-easy-way-to-read-em-on-your-iphone-or-ipod-touch-everything-from-ancient-classics-to-sherlock-holmes-and-modern-sf/comment-page-1/#comment-1163226 Branko Collin Sat, 10 Apr 2010 19:03:59 +0000 http://www.teleread.org/2009/02/18/25000-free-project-gutenberg-books-an-easy-way-to-read-em-on-your-iphone-or-ipod-touch-everything-from-ancient-classics-to-sherlock-holmes-and-modern-sf/#comment-1163226 Project Gutenberg volunteers are encouraged to indent text that should not be rewrapped. Of the 7 poetry books I sampled, 5 had their poems indented. This indentation could be used by download sites as a formatting hint. If your download sites garble correctly formatted poetry books, it is their own fault, not Project Gutenberg's. Also note that nowadays Project Gutenberg often releases its etexts in HTML format alongside Plain Text. If the sites you get your poetry books from does not use the HTML versions as source for their conversions, you can hardly blame Project Gutenberg. I do not know how Manybooks.net does things these days, but if I remember correctly they used to use the TXT version as a source for their conversions a couple of years ago even when HTML versions were available from Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg volunteers are encouraged to indent text that should not be rewrapped. Of the 7 poetry books I sampled, 5 had their poems indented. This indentation could be used by download sites as a formatting hint. If your download sites garble correctly formatted poetry books, it is their own fault, not Project Gutenberg’s.

Also note that nowadays Project Gutenberg often releases its etexts in HTML format alongside Plain Text. If the sites you get your poetry books from does not use the HTML versions as source for their conversions, you can hardly blame Project Gutenberg.

I do not know how Manybooks.net does things these days, but if I remember correctly they used to use the TXT version as a source for their conversions a couple of years ago even when HTML versions were available from Project Gutenberg.

]]> By: pstjmack http://www.teleread.com/ebooks/25000-free-project-gutenberg-books-an-easy-way-to-read-em-on-your-iphone-or-ipod-touch-everything-from-ancient-classics-to-sherlock-holmes-and-modern-sf/comment-page-1/#comment-1013660 pstjmack Thu, 19 Feb 2009 06:53:24 +0000 http://www.teleread.org/2009/02/18/25000-free-project-gutenberg-books-an-easy-way-to-read-em-on-your-iphone-or-ipod-touch-everything-from-ancient-classics-to-sherlock-holmes-and-modern-sf/#comment-1013660 I'm surprised you find this a big deal - the Manybooks site on the download site list for eReader has almost every Gutenberg title available, and the BookZ reader also links directly to Gutenberg. But this just highlights one key drawback with Gutenberg for all the ereaders for me - they can't format poetry properly! When I download classic poetry in eReader or ePub format, most of the time the result is an unreadable mess - no proper line spacing, no separation between verses, sometimes no separation between poems. So far no ebook program has managed to fix this - I don't know if the fault is Gutenberg's, but I guess it is, since it's the same fault across multiple readers, and both eReader and Stanza can display poems perfectly well. I'm having to remake by hand almost every file I download from Gutenberg, and it's a pain, so I wish they would - line breaks are pretty elementary! I’m surprised you find this a big deal – the Manybooks site on the download site list for eReader has almost every Gutenberg title available, and the BookZ reader also links directly to Gutenberg.

But this just highlights one key drawback with Gutenberg for all the ereaders for me – they can’t format poetry properly! When I download classic poetry in eReader or ePub format, most of the time the result is an unreadable mess – no proper line spacing, no separation between verses, sometimes no separation between poems.

So far no ebook program has managed to fix this – I don’t know if the fault is Gutenberg’s, but I guess it is, since it’s the same fault across multiple readers, and both eReader and Stanza can display poems perfectly well. I’m having to remake by hand almost every file I download from Gutenberg, and it’s a pain, so I wish they would – line breaks are pretty elementary!

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