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Favorite e-book source?
April 30, 2005 | 12:55 pm
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By David Rothman
In the wake of a related Slashdot article from earlier this month, MobileRead has a forum on a perennial topic–best sources of e-books.
My own is Blackmask because of the size of the library of freebies and the particular variety of formats available. If, however, you use a reader such as uBook, which can digest plain ASCII, HTML and nonencrypted Mobipocket, this format business does not matter as much as it would otherwise for public domain books. And commercial DRMed books? Well, I’ll legally borrow them but generally not buy them.
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Comments:
Although I use blackmask too, I have noticed a really annoying problem with .imp.
For poetry ebooks, blackmask .imp mess up the formatting in a major way. Either it substitutes several ?? marks for tabs/indents or it runs lines together. Totally unusable. Really annoying.
Also, page separators (usually 3 asterisks) almost always get converted to ??? marks in blackmask .imp’s.
One solution for the verse is to download the .rb files and use GEB Book librarian to convert from .rb to .imp. That usually solves the indenting/tab problem.
Also, while I’m being nitpicky, the site’s navigation sucks. But oh, I’ve downloaded 4 smartmedia cards worth of stuff from blackmask, so they can’t be that terrible!
Interesting information, Robert. Many thanks. I have less problem with navigation on the Blackmask site than you do, but this is subjective as all get-out. Manybooks.net just might take the honors as the best-organized public domain site. Thanks.
I too have had problems navigating Blackmask. The easiest way I’ve found is to save their dvd complete list. This is much easier to look through and then I can go and use their search feature to get the book I want.