LimpidSoft has now extended its range of quality free ebooks, as well as upgrading some of its earlier selections. The options are:
This will depend on how you want to use the file:
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:
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.
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.