QUALITY ETEXTS FOR FREE DOWNLOAD

LimpidSoft has now extended its range of quality free ebooks, as well as upgrading some of its earlier selections. The options are:

Which Format is for You?

This will depend on how you want to use the file:

  • If you have a Kindle, the choice is obvious, as the PDF files give the best display---by far;
  • If you want to generate hard copy in a typical paperback style, consider the A5 format;
  • If you intend to read a book on your computer, either A4 or A5 format is appropriate, particularly with adjustment of the display size;
  • If you have an ereader that accepts EPUB files, the choice may be obvious. But the display of such files is markedly inferior to that of good PDF files.
  • It is unlikely that you will choose to read marked-up text. (These files are included here for completeness---and a resource for further development.)
  • If you are desperate and want to use the EPUB files, but use an ereader that does not accept them, there is a way forward (see below).

Babel Revisited

These are early days for ereaders, but it seems pretty certain that they are going to become seriously commonplace. Brand loyalty may become serious, as this brings with it the problem of ereader/file compatibility. An example that is already with it is at a very simple level: Kindle 2 and HTML files: they don‘t mix. You can load an (X)HTML file, but it will be ignored!

LimpidSoft does not provide HTML files as such, but it does provide the EPUB format. And this is really just a standardised wrapper for XHTML. If you really want to view the contents of an EPUB file (say, ivanhoe.epub) on a Kindle, follow these steps:

  1. Rename the file to ivanhoe.zip;
  2. Unzip the resulting file;
  3. Look inside the resulting directory for an HTML file. Copy this to another location;
  4. Rename the copied file to make it look like a text file (in this case, it will be ‘ivanhoe.txt’);
  5. Load this file into your Kindle. Now you will be able to read it, but do not expect it to be in the same class as a PDF version of the same text!

Where Babel will lead us, who knows? But I have closed the list of formats that I can support on this site. Yes, I know that the .mobi format is out there, but I presently have a line in the sand.

Styling Shakepeare

Experience has shown that styling a book is pretty simple: simple because almost all books have a simple structure: book and chapter titles and paragraphs of text, perhaps with a few emphasised phrases. A play is another matter: titles for the play, acts and scenes--as well as myriads of speeches, each of which can be quite complex: speaker(s) with text lines interspersed with inline and block-style stage directions. So complex that any HTML representation is likely to be a compromise.

Limpidsoft has undertaken processing of Shakespeare‘s Tragedies but, because of their complexity, they are provided only in PDF format and their accociated LaTeX documents. Attention has been paid to designing the LaTeX documents so that they can be reprocessed in different styles and page formats.