yBook: Easier downloading and a spiffy paperback look for Gutenberg books

By David Rothman

A friend of mine owns a library of 10,000 dead-tree books, but many if not most of them are in storage. He is no Luddite, but would rather not mess around with all the fuss of downloading e-books. Just how to convert people like him to e-books, at least the public domain variety?

Until this week my answer for classics-lovers would have been, “Just go to Blackmask Online, the easiest-to-use site for public domain books. All the major formats are available.” In fact, Blackmask remains an attractive option, especially for PDA owners. But now there is another good choice for many people like my friend–yBook, written by Simon Haynes, an idealistic Australian writer who created it to help Gutenberg and promote his sci-fi writings along the way.

An easy five-minute install

yBook, a Windows program for desktops and laptops and Tablet PCs, not PDAs, is almost AOL-simple for the most part. My friend had it going in five minutes, and another e-book holdout was downloading and reading books in just about the same time. You see, yBook is an easy and handy Swiss Army knife. With just this one program you can pick a Gutenberg title, download it, read it and even print it. My own preference is to read Gutenberg books off my PDAs or my old Gemstar, but if I were using a desktop or laptop instead, I’d be crazy not to try yBook. Because of yBook’s general simplicity and its being free–though Pal Pay donations are welcome–it could be a godsend for schools and libraries. They can give it out to teachers and students.

What’s more, schools and libraries can use yBook to print books on demand. True, Gutenberg titles won’t look quite as spiffy as the commercial variety or contain pictures, but they’ll be far, far better than the alternative–no books at all. Now even the most cash-strapped schools can have access to thousands of classics. yBook will run on a 200mhz antique, and if I were Project Gutenberg founder Michael Hart, I’d be aggressively talking up yBook, especially once PG dealt with serious and related problems that are not the slightest fault of Simon Haynes.

Project Chaos

Did I say problems? Yes, plenty. Thanks to the chaos that has dogged Project Gutenberg despite its importance to the Net and the cosmos in general–I can’t think of life without it!–many a title doesn’t show up in Gutenberg’s main file database as yBook displays it. Why? Sloppiness. PG has not used consistent formats in the entries for the database. In fact, scads of the titles promised on the yReader-presented list do not even materialize when you request them, thanks to flaws at Gutenberg’s end. What’s more, yBook is also the victim of Gutenberg’s inconsistent uses of the ASCII format in the texts themselves, causing some lines, for example, to break in bizarre ways.

What a contrast to the newer and more orderly Gutenberg project in Australia, where Simon says a machine-readable catalogue meshes perfectly with yReader, and where I suspect that the locally produced texts do the same. But–and this is a big but!–the American Gutenberg ideally will be addressing these problems in the very near future. Alev Akman, cataloguer extraordinaire for Gutenberg, whose commonsense, alas, has all too often been ignored in the past by techies, will be taking up this cause after having corresponded with Simon at my suggestion. And meanwhile you can either stomach the serious inconsistencies of the GUTINDEX.ALLcatalogue file or download PG books the old-fashioned way and still enjoy a stellar reading experience that few other reading programs would give you.

An e-book reader fit for a monk–complete with a parchment background, if you want it

With yBook, even “raw” Gutenberg books can end up looking like paperback books on parchment, without the glare of a white background, even though you can make the background white if you want. Some friends and I hope to get monks at a small college interested in e-books. How fitting that the yBook will be able to give the old classics a parchment look! You see two pages at once on your screen, although, via a tap on the Shift-1 you can switch in a flash to a single-column view and vary the size of the window to change the column width (you may also need to adjust the background, whether pseudo-parchment or a plain color). Shift-2 returns you to the double-column mode.

Here’s a list of the main features, as accurately described by Simon Haynes with one little exception–pertaining to the mess at Gutenberg:

–Runs on Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP and Linux (using Wine)
–Displays text and html files on side-by-side pages.
–Resize the pages, adjust the margins, set text and paper colour.
–Search for words or phrases.
–Automatic bookmarks.
–Text sizes from tiny to HUGE.
–No zooming, panning or scrolling.
–Direct download of all Gutenberg titles, with index [at least once Gutenberg gets its database act together!].
–Espa?ol, Deutsch, Portugu?s, Nederlands, more to come.
–Completely Free: No registration, no adware, nothing.

That’s not all. You can even decide whether you want a space between paragraphs, and you can tell the program to change standard quotes to left and right quotes, or “smart quotes” as they’re called. In addition, where the Gutenberg texts specify underlining, yBook can turn it into italics.

Nice! I find it ironic that so many freeware programmers talk up Gutenberg, yet here, for the first time, is an e-book reader I can truly regard as “Gutenbergware,” because it sends people to the PG books of their choice without having to mess with URLs and the intricacies of .zip and format conversations and other such fun. Well, maybe not. The GEB eBook Librarian does that if your hardware is right–and also includes links to other neat sites–and I’m probably overlooking more possibilities. Still, this integration isn’t nearly as common as it should be. Many programmers, including some very good ones, shrug it off. But I don’t. Civilians care about such issues, and Simon Haynes understand this.

At some point after you see his program for the first time–it was an uneventful install in Windows XP on my Dell Optiplex P-IV–you click the right mouse button. You’ll see menu with setup info in areas ranging from font choices (whatever you have on your machine!) to the menu bar (I prefer the “on” mode since I can then click on a little circle near the bottom of the screen to bring up a navigation bar that lets me see how far along I am in a book).

Perhaps eight items down on the menu, you see the biggest glory of yBook–the opportunity to call up Gutenberg books directly from the program. You start by downloading a catalogue, then putting your cursor over the desired title and clicking on Download and Read.

With a three-megabit broadband connection, I downloaded a long Dreiser novel in less than 15 seconds, and automatic formatting took no more than perhaps 20. I cannot even recall if Gutenberg’s version of The Financier, at least the one I downloaded, was in ASCII or HTML. That’s how effortless Simon Haynes has made the process. What’s more, via Load command on the menu bar at the bottom, you can switch back and forth between titles–and end up either at the start of a book or where you were last reading. Alas, you can’t do multiple bookmarks, but Simon tells me it wouldn’t be difficult to add them.

Once the book is on your screen, you can go forward by clicking the right page and backwards by clicking the page on the left. Or you can use the right arrow to move ahead or the left one to go back. From the File menu, you can go to such submenus as Print (obvious), Export (to send the file to a different part of your disk), Load (bring up a different book on your screen) or Delete (zipping the present book).

Simon set up the printing for people who want a formal-looking book and will mess with double-sided printing and perhaps cutting and the rest. Printing is an area where this generally easy program could be simpler. I was impatient and used the following settings within the print menu to get no-fills pages with the page numbers at the bottom. Letter-sized paper. Single Side. Full Page. Fit to Page. Justified. Portrait. Worked fine on a Tom Swift book, but I’m not certain about others. Of course, seeing Tom on paper reminded me of another problem with PG books–the fact they’re cluttered with legal notices and other awesomely distracting verbiage in the front, when it most likely would be fine just to point people either to the end of the book or to a Web address for the fine print. Here’s to the gods of usability!

Having already given you some highlights of the yBook interface, I won’t bother paraphrasing the instruction manual. On to an email Q&A I had with Simon, which I’ll abridge!

Q. Could you make the navigation bar appear constantly at the bottom of the screen–so there’d be a nice visual way of the reader tracking his progress through the book? Page numbers are nice, but can’t there be more?

A. It doesn’t yet (space reasons), but I’ll bear that in mind.

Q. Also, would it be possible to set things up so that rolling the mouse wheel could move the two-page view either forward or backwards?

A. Unfortunately Visual Basic 6 doesn’t have anything to interact with the mousewheel. I think mousewheeels came out a few years after VB, which hasn’t had an update in donkey’s years. I mentioned Linux–my eventually goal is to rewriite yBook in a platform-independent matter, probably using something like wxWidgets. I’ve got 12 years or more of VB experience, though, so it’s a lot of unlearning.

Q. I like the program very much so far, and I can see why an old friend, a laptop owner, is so fond of it.

A. I use it on a 200-mhz Pentium laptop. It’s slow to load a book but usable after that. I was forced to use my laptop for a week last year, on holiday, and that’s when I wrote the page-caching code. See the green-orange-red LED on the menu bar. It’s orange when you turn a page, because the program is drawing the next page on a hidden screen

I’ve read a handful of full-length books on my laptop, and I certainly don’t find it a nuisance or unpleasant. In fact, trying to hold open some of the thick fantasy books they publish these days is much more of a nuisance than reading off the screen.

Q. Would welcome bio and other background info. Happy to do a pointer to your magazine. Very Net friendly way of promoting it.

A. Andromedia Spaceways? http://www.andromediaspaceways.com. We’re a non-profit, co-opt, about to print issue 12. There’s some background info on the site or I can send more if you need it.

The yBook page is the most visited on my site. Possibly because it supports TXT and HTML, which the other readers often ignore.

As an aside, I use the print engine in yBook to lay out and print my novels on a duplex laser, two up side-by-side, ready for binding and cropping. I self-published the Hal Spacejock series in Australia as a way of keeping myself writing while seeking a ‘real’ publisher for the books. There’s an annual con here in Perth, Western Australia, and last year I promised a handful of Hal fans that I could have the next book ready for April 9. It went to the binders yesterday.

* * *

Other thoughts from Simon:

I wrote the thing specifically to reformat and display Gutenberg books properly, and I don’t think it’s a bad program. I’ve read a number of books on my laptop with it, and I also use it to print my novels. (I built in a printing routine for duplex lasers–you can print off the loaded book in booklet mode, two-sided, then crop and bind. Also does two-up, I just printed 105 copies of my third novel over the weekend in an 18-hour session

What I’d really like is a machine-readable catalog file, zipped. E.g.

subfolder,title,author,comments,filename
etext99,”This is a book title, you see”, “Author, A.N.”,”Revision 2.1 multiple versions”,abcfeff.zip etext04,”This is another book”, “Author2, A.N.”,”Revision 1A”,abcfg.zip

That would make my life really easy, I could display the list properly and ensure people got the right book when they clicked ‘download’. I was using pgwhole.zip, but now it seems to be GUTINDEX.ALL so I spent a couple of hours last night changing things around to parse that file instead. (The 1.3.76 version of yBook uses this newer file.)

I don’t know how easy it is for you to correlate the file list from the server with the catalogue file.

It will be interesting to see if the main Project Gutenberg follows the example of the Australian PG and does a yBook-compatible index. I’ll be returning to this issue in the future and trust that Gutenberg will be more responsive on format matters than, say, the Open eBook Forum. The real solution for Gutenberg is an XML-based conversation engine spitting out perfect copy in many formats, and James Linden, a key PG volunteer as well as TeleRead‘s technical consultant, has been among those working just such a creature. What’s more, yBook is not by any means a substitute for the much-needed Universal Consumer Format for dealing with, say, textbooks with complicated formats and otherwise serving the needs of schools, high ed, various professions and large publishers. But yBook is much-needed PGware. For the moment, yBook, although not part of the American Gutenberg itself, is one of the best things that the original PG has going. With it, Alev will have a new QC tool to try to persuade the stubborn to stick to consistent formats in catalogues and text.

As for the Australian Gutenberg, I know one of the very best ways of all to lobby against copyright term extension. Just go from office to office of various MPs–after having had the software certified as virus free–and offer to install it on their machines. Then the MPs can see public domain books in their full glory. Remember, as in the States, public domain relies on the kindness of powerful strangers. If made aware of the direct benefits of the PD, via yBooks, MPs might be that much less inclined to roll over for Disney executives, Jack Valenti and the other members of the U.S. copyright elite.

Recommended project for Simon or friends: A freeware dictionary that could work when one clicked on a word. Perhaps this won’t be possbile. But, especially for school and library use, it would be good to have for a future version of yBook. Yo, Simon? Any possibilities here.

Tip: Check Simon’s site for other freeware programs ranging from text-to-speech software to a reminder program and a yBook-focused e-book compiler and email software. He also sells low-cost software, including FCharts Pro–stock-charting software, of which he also offers a free version.