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By David Rothman

Housekeeping: We’ve shortened our home page to lighten the server load. Try Previous Entries to see other material from today. – D.R.

imageKindle owners can download ePub books from Google Books, then have converted files emailed directly to their K machines, through the experimental  RetroRead service.

Given all the hundreds of thousands of classics and other books on Google—many of them free—RetroRead sounds more than a little useful.

Sponsor is BLTC Press, a publisher of books in the Kindle format. Excerpt:

“All you need to do is register your Kindle’s email address here at RetroRead. Then search books.google.com for any of classic public domain epubs that interest you…

“Once you’ve found the public domain Google book you want to send to your Kindle, click to the details page for that title, and select the "Download/EPUB" option from the viewer, and download the book to your computer. Windows users can forward the book directly to their Kindle by using the retroreadhelper, which copies the books to the RetroRead site; either way, once you upload your epub file, RetroRead converts it, and emails it directly to your Kindle, all in about five minutes!”

Details

1. Remember, you can take PDF files from Google Books and have Amazon itself convert them, but RetroRead might be a little more convenient.

2. There are Amazon charges for doing conversion to Mobipocket, a Kindle-readable format.

3. I have not yet tried the service myself.

4. RetroRoad apparently will allow just a limited number of sign-ups, so best to hurry—you’ll need to email beta@retroread.com for a registration key.

5. You’ll be entrusting your private Kindle address to RR. I highly doubt this is a spam ploy but can’t guarantee it isn’t.

(Via MobileRead.)

 
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