Hadrien
Both EPUB and Mobipocket editions have better footnotes now.
You should really divide your text into chapters and add a cover, this would turn your novel into something much more attractive for Feedbooks users.
This book shouldn't be posted in the "original books" section in the first place: I'll have to move it to the "public domain" section or remove it.
Having a complete edition of Aristotle works is useful but some of the formatting in this book is pretty bad.
Take a look at most books and you'll see that they have page breaks.
Just use sections instead of pasting the whole book into a text element and it'll work fine (and you'll also get a TOC).
Very interesting collection of essays which complements nicely the public domain books available on Feedbooks.
Dividing the collection into sections (an essay per section) would make the book easier to navigate through, and would improve the overall presentation.
It could be interesting to create a list for each volume too.
Several problems with the formatting of this book:
* instead of a single block of text, you should divide your book into sections and chapters. Better presentation and it'll give you a table of contents too.
* avoid manually indenting paragraphs
* it's all written in bold text ?
Project Gutenverg updated their version and this one was based on the previous version.
I've updated the text and added dropcaps too.
Sony is still using an old version of the Adobe SDK that cannot support text flows > 300k. Authors like Balzac and Proust often have very long text flows without any page breaks or chapters.
Use a custom PDF file in this case, or ask Sony to remove this stupid limit and update to the latest SDK (with proper support for justified text too).
You should really fix the formatting of the book: no need to manually indent the paragraphs, they're automatically indented and it'll look ugly with manual indents on a small screen.
It already looks a lot better. One final advice though: don't manually indent paragraphs.
Rather than pasting the whole book into a single block of text, you need to create chapters and paste the text for each chapter.
You loved your own book ?
It's pretty badly edited: instead of a single block of text, this should be divided into chapters.
Now that you only distribute a preview and not the full edition of "Rowan of the Wood", I strongly recommend to edit the title and/or description. Otherwise it might confuses potential reader expecting a full book.
Congratulations: "How To Disappear Completely" is now the most popular self-published book on Feedbooks !
Do you want me to switch the ownership of the book to you Marc ? This way you could update the text if necessary.
Je compte faire une liste avec toutes les aventures de Rocambole une fois qu'on aura un peu avancé dans leur publication comme cela ça sera facile de les avoir dans l'ordre.
Just tried it a second ago and it worked fine on Mobipocket Reader on Windows. A corrupted download maybe ?
@rethakul: you should really update the book whenever you write a new episode. Just click on "edit this book" on this page and add a new section. Shouldn't take more than a minute for each new episode.
It's not a stylistic difference but a semantic one: the text is formatted using br instead of p. This means that on a reading system where the user can select things such as indentation for the paragraphs or paragraph spacing, these settings won't work.
A 127-pages long text flow can also be problematic for devices with limited memory such as the Sony Reader. If a text flow is longer than 300k it won't be able to open the file: that's why I asked if the text could use page breaks.
Finally, there's no need to point out to a specific format: they're all affected by the problem with paragraphs.
Updated with a version provided by the Pax Librorum folks: http://www.paxlibrorum.com/
Real paragraphs instead of line breaks would look A LOT better (indented first lines).
No division at all for the book ? Is it really a single text flow without page breaks ?
Use the ePub file if you have a PRS-505 or 700. Tried the PDF though and it's not corrupted, probably an error while you downloaded the file.
Because it's the original ancient Indian text, not something that you'd buy in a sex shop.
Well, the user who created the page (Feedbooks is crowdsourced) probably didn't know about it. Do you want me to remove the bio ? I've changed the attributions in the meantime.
You should correctly divide your text into multiple sections & chapters rather than use a single flow of text: it would look better and generate a table of contents too.
This ePub file works perfectly well on DE desktop or Stanza though.
The main problem here is that Adobe introduced a limit to the size of a flow on their mobile port of DE for the Sony PRS-505/700. They don't support flows that are > 300k.
On Feedbooks, we follow the structure of the book, and switch to a new flow whenever there's a page break.
In Ulysses, there's hardly any page breaks aside those between the different parts: that's why some of the flows are > 300k.
We could add page breaks in the middle of the text to make sure that the flows are small enough, but for the moment we've decided to keep the original structure of the book rather than using page breaks where they should be none.
Not anymore.
The original uploader sure screwed this upload, BUT editing Kipling is hard with all those songs and poems (something usually tricky in e-books).
Anyway, I edited this one myself and fixed the formatting.
Should display fine in ePub and PDF, as for Mobipocket well... Let's say that Mobipocket is limited, I'm not sure that it'll understand the CSS rules about removing text-indents.
Most of these websites do direct conversions, while we have something similar to an XML workflow.
To keep a consistent look across our books, we white-list only a limited subset of CSS properties, and almost every XHTML tags.
As a source, I would avoid using Word as much as possible on your end. XHTML is a much better alternative overall.
Word can be pretty problematic when you cut & paste because it adds a lot of garbage and usually generate messy HTML. We try to fix this, but there's a limit to what we can do.
One small advice about the formatting: avoid blank lines between the paragraphs. We auto-indent paragraphs in our output, and books usually don't have blank lines between paragraphs. If the reader prefer extra space between the paragraphs, the reading system can take care of the problem and let him select this setting.
Probably just cache on your end (browser) for the PDF, anytime that you edit a book, it is generated again on our end.
I don't know why you had this bug with the cover though, try http://imageshack.us/ maybe.
Just a few suggestions:
- Instead of displaying the name of each chapter inside the flow of the chapter, you should replace "new chapter" with each chapter's name
- A cover would help this book a lot: books with customized covers are usually downloaded more often (I know it sounds silly, but people DO judge a book by its cover too)
Looks interesting, too bad that it's not as well formatted as "Plug your book!" though.
Adrian: I truly love your cover experiments. Each time I visit the page of one your stories, there's a new cover !
I'll add this to my Creative Commons Science Fiction list. Would you label it apocalyptic fiction and cyberpunk too ? Got lists for those too.
I don't know: it seems that the author didn't uploaded the text. I'll put it back in edit mode and contact the author.
You're looking in the public domain section, not the self-published one that's why.
If you make a search on the whole website, you'll find it immediately: http://www.feedbooks.com/site/search?query=Storm+clouds
I took care of this problem and removed the bold.
Aside from incorrect markup, I don't see what could have caused this problem.
That's the URL of a page, not an image. The URL for the image is: http://c3.ac-images.myspacecdn.com/images02/24/l_1517a114690b496fbcf7818955ef902a.jpg
I modified the cover for you.
Ann,
There's really room for improvements on the formatting of this book.
First of all, you need to avoid at all cost the idea of using a single huge chunk of text for the whole book. Divide your book into chapters that will show up in the TOC, add page breaks, and offer a much better looking layout to your book.
I see a lot of broken lines too at the beginning of each chapter (Letter -line break- rest of the text). You probably used something like dropcaps for these ? We'll add dropcaps soon on Feedbooks but in the meantime you should remove the line break between the first character and the rest of the paragraph.
Check our help pages:
- http://www.feedbooks.com/help/self-publishing
- http://www.feedbooks.com/help/publishing
- http://www.feedbooks.com/help/formatting_tips
What's the URL for the cover KimberAn ?
Here are my recommendations on the formatting:
- we auto generate a title screen for you, there's no need to add another one
- avoid using multiple blank lines like on the title screen: for small devices (smartphones for example) this will generate several empty pages
- if your chapter have names, replace "New chapter" with the name (just click on New Chapter while editing). Otherwise, just leave it blank (click on New Chapter and remove the text)
- there seems to be some broken lines in your text, with line breaks where they should be none (for example in the first chapter: She tapped -line break- her chin...)
- I read something about indenting on Mobileread from your part: do not manually indent paragraphs, they're auto indented and you should leave this choice to the user. You can add non-breaking spaces for things like poems, where it's part of the structure of the text, but otherwise, avoid them.
Why do you use bold for the whole text ? It's much better to let the reader select these things.
I added the books that you mentioned but I can't find Probability Angels, are you sure that it was uploaded and published on Feedbooks ?
For modern day american authors, try this link, you'll find plenty of them: http://www.feedbooks.com/userbooks/recent?lang=en
You can search by language, just add language:es for spanish in the query.
For example, Cervantes in spanish: http://www.feedbooks.com/site/search?query=language:es+Cervantes
You can also list all the books in a particular language, the most popular books in spanish for example: http://www.feedbooks.com/books/top?lang=es
In the case of this book, the description is the introduction from the original publication.
Aside from the description provided by the uploader, the comments exist for this specific reason: any user can give its opinion about a particular book.
While we check the content in the "discover" section, we have a "hands off" approach on the share section.
As I've said in my previous comment, as long as the book is clearly presented as such, I'm fine with excerpts.
Any book downloaded in our "discover" section will always be a full book, but in the "share" section, people are allowed to publish articles, short stories or excerpts and not just full novels. That's how any user generatedwebsite (video, images, music) work.
It's not posted by Feedbooks, David directly uploaded this excerpt himself and I'm fine with excerpts as long as they're presented as such. In this case, if you read the description it's clear enough...
Seems to be a problem with this specific URL: even in my browser it takes a while to display.
I uploaded the image somewhere else, tried to change the cover once again and it worked fine.
Too bad that you didn't include the cover though: to add a cover while editing your book, click on the auto-generate cover and paste the URL of your image.
Importing a Word or PDF would be the same as copying everything into a single block text: aside from page breaks and slightly bolder fonts, you don't have a real structure in such documents.
I've divided the whole book for you and used real footnotes too (instead of displaying the footnotes at the end of the text).
You plan on constantly upgrading the book to add new episodes right ? It's fairly easy: add a new section each time that you have a new episode to add and paste the text from your blog.
I've also featured the book, it'll show up in our selection on Stanza (iPhone) and will be displayed every now and then on our homepage.
This book would look a lot better if it was properly divided into sections instead of a single flow of text. Check our help pages: http://www.feedbooks.com/help/publishing
It was recently uploaded on Feedbooks: http://www.feedbooks.com/book/3403
Interesting list but there's far more than 12 out of the 100 books, available on Feedbooks.
Non, tous les fichiers sont valides sur Feedbooks, c'est lié à une limitation de l'implémentation sur le Sony Reader: pas de support des flux XHTML de plus de 300k. Il suffit de tester sur un PC: le fichier marche très bien.
On crée un nouveau flux à chaque fois qu'il y a un saut de page, mais dans le cas de cet ouvrage, il n'y a que 3 parties divisant le texte. Je me penche encore sur la question: cela demande d'ajouter des sauts de pages qui n'existent pas normalement pour que DE accepte d'ouvrir le texte sur Sony Reader, chose qui m'agace particulièrement.
Nice comment bufocalvin, I'll use it as the new description for this book.
The Wikisource version is based on the PG Australia version too: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Talk:Lady_Chatterley's_Lover
Why don't you publish it here Jeff if it's CC ?
This way I'll add it to the list and it'll be directly available for Kindle users (http://www.feedbooks.com/help/kindle#guide) or iPhone users (http://www.feedbooks.com/help/iphone) on their devices.
I'm glad that we finally have this book on Feedbooks !
Various release notes:
- I've included all the footnotes as real footnotes in the PDF editions. For Mobipocket and ePub they're currently displayed inline but will be turned into links in the future.
- In one chapter there's various illustrations. They're not available yet since we haven't finished the support for images in all 3 formats. I'll add them as soon as this feature is available.
- I've hesitated between linking or not the #link element in the book. Since I'm not sure that all the links are still available, I decided to remove them for the moment. This may change in a future revision.
Not public domain, but an interesting trilogy for those who love time travel stories nevertheless.
In most places over the world, books enter the public domain 70 years after the death of their author (in some places, such as Canada, it's 50 years).
There's 2 other books that you might also consider for that list:
- Tales of Old Japan: http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2726
- The Book of Tea: http://www.feedbooks.com/book/991
Download Stanza in the App Store and you'll be able to download it through the catalog system.
Here's our help page: http://www.feedbooks.com/help/iphone
The uploader didn't divided the files into multiple sections and probably did a simple copy/paste from a plain text file: that's why you get these line breaks.
Pas un problème de logiciel pro mais de source. On gère maintenant tout ce qui est espace insécable automatiquement par exemple autour de la ponctuation.
Il faut soit trouver une source de meilleure qualité, soit faire la relecture pour corriger ces éléments. En ce qui concerne les éléments de ponctuation spécifiques à la langue française, c'est en général un problème du à l'utilisation d'un encodage non UTF-8 qu'ils disparaissent de la source.
A vue de nez ça vient donc tout droit, mais ils ont du le mettre à jour depuis: http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext01/swann11h.htm
Indeed, that's the problem. I'll extend the list of characters to escape for the Kindle. Should be online tomorrow.
Corrigé le texte: l'utilisateur qui l'avait mis en ligne, n'avait pas enlevé les césures de la source Word.
Texte mis à jour avec un fichier source envoyé par François Bon (publie.net).
James Patrick Kelly is an amazing writer: he truly understands that the one and only goal of SF is to explore the human soul.
I haven't been disappointed by a single of his short stories so far.
Very interesting review carandol, I'll read this book and add it to my Utopia/Dystopia list too !
Loved this short story and everything I've read from James Patrick Kelly so far !
There's a very good reason why this story is both in the “Hugo Awards & Nominees” and the “Locus Awards” lists.
It's the best kind of SF, the one about us - humans - through the use of technology or a different setting.
Highly recommended if you'd like to grasp the concept of singularity.
Once you've finished this essay, you can try reading “Accelerando” or “Post-Singular”, both of them are also available on Feedbooks.
Yes, chapter 19 was missing but I've updated the source and everything should be fine now.
They updated the source on PG, I'll upload the new one today, should be much better.
The source for this novel is Kadrey's blog and unfortunately, the source itself is full of those problems. If anyone is patient enough to proofread the whole text...
Updated the text based on another source: should remove the hyphens.
Loved this book too, an excellent novella that was awarded a Nebula in 2006.
Done, for some reason the file in the cache was corrupted but it's fine now.
Yes, Metrophage is a perfect example of the cyber-punk universe that Gibson kick-started with Neuromancer.
Lately I've been reading a lot of Transmetropolitan too, another must-have for comics & cyber-punk fans.
Fixed.
Thank you for noticing this mistake. I need to implement a system that will allow anyone to post a fix in this sort of situation.
Loved this book !
I'm addicted to tea, and learning about the history and traditions while sipping a cup of Luang Ching was fantastic.
Nothing wrong here, this is a PDF created in the right size for the Sony Reader. Just download it and put it on the device and it'll work fine.
If you know any other public domain books about time travel, please let a comment here and I'll add it to this list.
Oui c'est un grand classique pour le romantisme. Quel idiot que ce jeune Werther, mais il est attachant malgrès tout...
Chef d'oeuvre de la littérature russe, "Le Maître et Marguerite" est une fable fantastique nous contant l'arrivée du Diable en personne à Moscou.
Admirable dans tous les registres abordés, cette oeuvre impose surtout Boulgakov comme un des plus grands héritiers de Gogol auprès de Kafka.
Un grand de la littérature russe à placer auprès de Biély dans sa bibliothèque.
Bonne utilisation d'une narration "récursive", dans un contexte fantastique cela ajoute au côté mystérieux et irrémédiable de la chose.
An excellent gothic novel. Very similar to Jan Potocki's "The Manuscript Found in Saragossa", this is a classic tale of both supernatural beings and love.
If you've read or are planning to read books such as 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451 or V for Vendetta, reading this book should make a whole lot of sense too.
Premier ajout poétique donc pour cette partie du site...
Grâce à toi, j'ai donc pu travailler sur la mise en page des poésies !
Well, I guess the reason is that this book was created using an HTML version (amp; is & in HTML), it'll be easy to correct this mistake.
Goncharov may not be as famous than most XIXth century russian writers (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy...), but Oblomov is a real classic, that you shouldn't miss.
The slow decay of the main character, losing his will to live and living in dreams of a lazy past, has a universal appeal, making Oblomov some sort of Don Juan or Don Quixote, the shape of something we might recognize in the people that surround us.
on Nov 19, 2009 at 14:47