9
Jan
2008
Cory Doctorow for the Books.app (iPhone/iPod Touch)
It is important to note that I’m really into the writings - and general musings in any form of media - of Cory Doctorow. So much so that when I decided to order his second and third novels on Amazon.ca and found out it would take 6-8 weeks to ship I was furious. Fine. Disappointed. How could I be denied my precious books for so long. The tactile and olfactory pleasure of the paper novel is unrivaled. Sure, I could have walked down to my local book shop on Bloor St. in the Annex of Toronto and they most surely would have copies of each but eff, I’m in bed - I was at the time - and don’t want to move. I guess the tactile and olfactory pleasure of the paper novel is rivaled. It’s rivaled by the combination of the comfort of my girlfriends bed, my iPod Touch and my wireless internet. It’s rivaled most for my love of the Project.
Project
I just bought a new iPod Touch. I’ve just installed an eBook reader. I should make myself useful and take Cory up on his desire to have the general public mutate - within the bounds of the respected Creative Commons License - his work to our needs. It took about 5 minutes for me to adapt Eastern Standard Tribe’s distributed html file into the directory structure and loading size required for the reader and I was off to the races.
Since then I have actually put together a zip file for each book. The book is split into several html files - one for each chapter - for ease of navigation and to lighten text load times.
This may be obsolete very soon but that’s ok. It’s a solution for the time being. Please enjoy these wonderful novels from Cory Doctorow in all their splendor:
someone_comes_to_town_by_cory_doctorow-1.0.zip
eastern_standard_tribe_by_cory_doctorow-1.0.zip
Note: You may insert an img file named cover.jpg (preferably width of 300px) into the root directory of the books and it will load in the cover page of the book as well as in the eBook browser. I can not distribute the covers because as beautiful as they are, they’re not mine to distribute.
Regards
Ben
January 11th, 2008 at 3:42 am
Hi Ben,
thank you for these great books by Cory… Just out of curiosity, did you use a particular program to split the html into chapters or did you do it the old fashioned way, manually? I’m asking because I have lots of html files that I’d like to load into my iPod Touch, and this seems the fastest way for it to open them… Thank you again!
Dion Forster Says:
January 12th, 2008 at 3:27 am
Hi Ben,
Thanks so much for putting Cory’s books in your feed for the iPhone. I downloaded them via apptapp last night and started reading them right away! They are GREAT!!!
Thanks so much man!
Now, I need to ask if you would be willing to do the same with my books? I have published 3 of them (they currently for sale on Mobipocket and Amazon.com). However, I would very much like to make them available for free… I do, however, need someone who would be willing to put them in an iPhone sources feed so that they can be downloaded directly.
If you can help me I would very much appreciate it!!!! I can be reached via email at digitaldion _at_ gmail.com, or via my blog http://www.spirituality.org.za/blogger.html
I’d truly appreciate it! Thanks so much again.
Dion
Jonathan Hartley Says:
January 12th, 2008 at 10:15 am
Is it a dumb question to ask how I get these books onto my unlocked iPhone. The other ebooks I’ve read I’ve installed using the ‘installer’ application.
lizerazu Says:
January 14th, 2008 at 8:35 am
Thanks for the support. I’ll answer these questions in further posts starting with this one:
http://blog.lizerazu.org/?p=12
Doodee Says:
February 2nd, 2008 at 11:33 am
Thanks for sharing
Plonnaica Says:
February 7th, 2008 at 3:59 am
I’d prefer reading in my native language, because my knowledge of your languange is no so well. But it was interesting! Look for some my links: