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By David Rothman

image For years, Project Gutenberg’s people debated whether to offer books in ePub, the standard format.

Then Marcello Perathoner, the PG Webmaster, just made ePub happen—as one of a bunch of formats created through a conversion scheme.

Now Marcelo has a new goal: make the PG site easier to use for Kindles, mobile phones and other devices with puny browsers.

This little project is not on the wish lists of other PG people, but Marcello’s philosophy is, Just do it. Here’s how you can help him right now. Get Marcello a Kindle and cell phones to try out, including phones using Android. An iPod Touch, which is an iPhone without the cellphone, also could be extremely helpful. That way, as Marcello experiments with site improvements, he can see how they work on the actual hardware.

If you don’t have the have hardware to donate but want to help out with cash, I suspect that wouldn’t help.You can make arrangements directly with Marcello by emailing him at marcello at perathoner.de.

I myself wonder if volunteers with the right skill sets couldn’t be useful, too, but hardware is Marcello’s real wish (he says it would take too much time to coordinate volunteers).

The hardware will be put to good use, believe me. Remember, as shown by the ePub effort, Marcello already has a track record.

Below I’ll reproduce Marcello’s request in his own words:

I’m mainly looking for hardware to check what I’m doing.

One thing is to build a site with tiny simple pages, but to build a site that performs and feels well on mobile devices is another thing.

I bought a Sony Reader—because you can get one of those in Europe with no strings attached—and then I tweaked the epub converter until it looked passably good on that hardware.

At that time you couldn’t get a Kindle outside the USA, so Amazon lost by default.

Same goes for the iPhone. Maybe I would have bought one of those, but in Germany Apple sells only iPhones locked to providers. Last time I looked for a data plan they wanted EUR 80 a month for a minimum of two years and don’t even allow to use it with your laptop. I don’t like being robbed and so no iPhone for me.

Bottom line: if you can get your [readers] to donate an iPhone or Kindle / Android phone / whatever they want to see working, then I’ll start working on the site. All items must be unlocked and usable in Europe. Older generation hardware is also welcome.

Note: As I said, the iPod Touch can be an iPhone substitute. While the iPhone can do WiFi and thus not rely on a subscription, I’m not sure if you must activate with a phone company even to use just the WiFi option. But an iPod Touch would definitely work for Marcello without a subscription fee.

Reminder: The above donations if made to Marcello directly will not qualify for tax benefits, at least not here in the States. But we’re not talking about major money here anyway. “Direct” is the way to go so the resources will indeed be used for the above purposes.

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