and this is just rad:

]]> http://chamberfour.com/2010/02/24/wednesday-links-2-24-10/feed/ 0 http://chamberfour.com/2009/10/30/halloween-reading/ http://chamberfour.com/2009/10/30/halloween-reading/#comments Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:00:56 +0000 Sean Clark http://chamberfour.com/?p=4856 Happy Halloween boys and ghouls. Here’s some quick suggestions for spooky reads:

This is one of my favorite books of all time. It’s not like anything you’d expect from seeing Karloff flicks, rather it’s steeped in pathos and haunting characterization. Read my mini-review here, and download a free copy Happy Halloween boys and ghouls. Here’s some quick suggestions for spooky reads:

This is one of my favorite books of all time. It’s not like anything you’d expect from seeing Karloff flicks, rather it’s steeped in pathos and haunting characterization. Read my mini-review here, and download a free copy here.

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The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe.

He’s the master. Enough said about that. Download for free.

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Pretty much anything written by H.P. Lovecraft

He’s a lesser know master, but a master nonetheless. I’m especially in favor of “The Call of Chutlhu” and “Herbert West: Reanimator.” Some of his work is public domain as well.

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Dracula by Bram Stoker

Another great book eclipsed by offshoot Hollywood and pop culture iterations. This book is original and great and old enough to be free.

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Night Shift by Stephen King

He’s gotten a little redundant in recent years, but I had to include Stephen King on this list.  I happen to love some of the stories included in this collection, however I almost chose Pet Sematary instead, and you can’t go wrong with that choice either.

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Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark by Alvin Swartz

Remember these books from the Scholastic book fairs? They provide a nice collection of spooky tales and lore. The real draw though is the incredible, creepy illustrations. They seriously gave me nightmares when I was little. Read online.

The presentation is top notch. Texts are far more readable in Eucalyptus than in the other reader apps I’ve tried. On top of this everything is well organized, intuitive and easy to navigate. They’ve included plenty of animations and graphical touches that give the package a decidedly professional flair. This does wonders negating the fears of buyer’s remorse I had when I first agreed to spend $10.

The creators of Eucalyptus have taken the time to create little card catalogue pages displaying each book’s publishing info, and the page turning and book shelving animations do a lot for the aesthetic. My favorite touch is a Staff Picks section, which arranges top choices for the user like a display shelf at a book store, and includes book synopses in case you’re choosing from books you’ve never read or heard of before.

I dig the presentation.

The text itself is far more readable due to the excellent formatting. The app uses nice fonts, more akin to hardcover typesets than the typical Courier/Times fonts seen in most other apps. The contrast between font and background is finely tuned as well. Best yet, the actual formatting (tabs, indents, punctuation) looks professional.

I didn’t come across any wonky spacing, jumbled sentences, or any of the other problems too common in many public domain ebooks. These books appear to have been actually proofed, and that adds a lot to the experience. Oh, and the formatting adjusts with text resizing (which you can do with pinch and push gestures). All this makes the experience feel much closer to reading a book than a computer screen, which I appreciate.

Noticably lacking are text search and highlighting features. They aren’t things I use all that often on mobile readers, but it would be nice to have. The library search functions work well though, as do the contents tables. A great touch is an anonymous feedback feature, which allows you do send a screenshot with comments about technical problems or text copy to the Eucalyptus support. This not only shows a commitment to the customer and to the quality of the product―something lacking in many apps―but also nicely represents Project Gutenberg as a community of readers dedicated to perfecting this electronic library.

Properly formatted public domain text on an iPhone app!

If you want to buy and/or import your newer ebooks to read on your iPhone, go with Stanza or the new Barnes & Noble app. However, if you’re primarily into reading older books on your iPhone–maybe you are someone like me who doesn’t want to pay bookstore prices for a reading experience mostly relegated to the daily commute–Eucalyptus is clearly the most readable and attractive option.

$10 is a tad steep, so Stanza is still a great option for the thrifty reader of classics, but hopefully a price drop is in the future. I should note that 20% of proceeds go to Project Gutenberg, which makes the purchase a little easier to swallow.

To see it in action, check out the video below. It really does look good.

So I though about getting into a subscription based audiobook program to keep up with newer books, but then I decided just to start borrowing audiobooks from the library and ripping them to my computer. In the meantime, I began getting audiobooks from a site called LibriVox, where volunteers upload recordings of readings from public domain books. I was immediately (and still am a little) astounded at the high quality of the readings and recordings. They are pleasant and professional. They are also free.

Audiobooks (not the most creative of names) is a free app from the Appstore that provides an iPhone/iPod conduit to the LibraVox catologue. It is a really great program for quickly and easily getting public domain audiobooks and listening to them. The presentation isn’t fancy, but it’s not ugly either, and it is certainly functional. You can browse by author, title, or genre, search for a specific book, or choose “Surprise Me” and get a random offering. You can only choose from LibraVox’s library, which comes from the Project Gutenberg library, and you cannot upload your own audiobooks (which would be totally unecessary seeing as the iPhone has a built in iPod). LibraVox’s selection is satisfyingly deep. Find a book you like and hit download, then you’re good to go.

Downloading files requires WiFi, which might prove a bummer in certain situations, but all in all it’s not that big a deal. With files that can be in the hundreds megabytes range, waiting for the 3G download would be a pain in the tookus. It’s also worth noting that unlike with reader apps, it’s not a good idea to go downloading like crazy when you first get the app. Though a small pocket library of audiobooks would be nice, the large file sizes can chew up the limited space on your device quickly. You can listen to the first chapter while the rest download, which is a nice touchthat lets you dive right in .

A free app that offers a wealth of high quality content is a welcome addition to my home screen indeed. I’ll certainly be listening to most of my audiobooks between Audiobooks, LibriVox, and Overdrive, rather than paying harcover prices for forgettable books.

After a certain amount of time (usually 50-70 years in the US) beyond the author’s death, copyrights expire and the work falls into the public domain. Meaning we all own it. (I should note here that I am not a copyright lawyer, I’d be much richer and yet more depressed if I were.) So when you pay $25 for a nice hardcover of Wuthering Heights at Borders, you’re paying for the paper, binding, typesetting, and accompanying essays. This is also why there is a $5 paperback of Wuthering Heights on the same shelf.

Project Gutenbergs aim is to digitize all the out-of-copyright texts in the world and make them available for free to anyone who wants them. This is done entirely by volunteers, which an impressive degree of efficiency. It began humbly:

On July 4, 1971, on Independence Day, Michael keyed in The United States Declaration of Independence (signed on July 4, 1776) to the mainframe he was using. In upper case, because there was no lower case yet. But to send a 5 K file to the 100 users of the embryonic internet would have crashed the network. So Michael mentioned where the eText was stored (though without a hypertext link, because the web was still 20 years ahead). It was downloaded by six users. Project Gutenberg was born.

And look how things have grown (these two quotes pulled from their history document by Marie Lebert, which you can read in entirety here):

37 years after its birth, Project Gutenberg is running at full capacity. It had 5,000 books online in April 2002, 10,000 books in October 2003, 15,000 books in January 2005, 20,000 books in December 2006 and 25,000 books in April 2008, with 340 new books available per month, 40 mirror sites in a number of countries, books downloaded by the tens of thousands every day, and tens of thousands of volunteers in various teams.

What this does for digital texts is infinitely important. The vast majority of (if not all) digitized classic texts online originate from Project Gutenberg’s team of reader volunteers. Sites such as ManyBooks.net have improved about PG’s foundation, allowing any user to download these books in a vast array of formats, thus aiding readers in customizing their personal digital libraries to their liking. The classic book toss-ins offered by companies like Sony and Amazon also have PG to thank, and–whether you consider it a blessing or a cluttered curse–iPhone apps and stand alone mobile versions of classic books also originate from PG’s deep, public-owned library (which is why you should only pay for them if they actually put in some TLC).

It’s not all roses though. With such a vast database of text, some can be messier than others.  Personally I find the opening text blocks you’ve got to trudge through before the opening paragraphs to be cumbersome eyesores, and the formatting can be wonky (the Shakespeare compilation is particularly rough around the edges). ManyBooks and others have helped with this in many respects, but the offerings are still far less polished than the professional, salable texts offered by many online bookstores. A professionally curated digital library built on PG’s foundation would be amazing indeed, but the lack of money involved in such an endeavor make it unlikely without heavy subsidy (from say the Library of Congress) which is equally unlikely. It also sets up the unfortunate clutter situation seen in places like on the iPhone where many shoddily put together single title appbooks waste space in an already disorganized store. Charging a dollar or more for these is dishonest at best, and unfortunately many users just don’t know better.

Despite this, Project Gutenberg represents something essential to remember as books migrate to the digital world: books (the words and ideas) are first and foremost an art form, and a business later. Now that these books are in the public domain, they essentially belong to the public.  I’m all for buying a nice special edition with some great accompanying essays (indeed I do, often, and recommend others do the same), just don’t get hoodwinked. PG is the first and deepest electronic library, and an invaluable service to readers around the world.

How can you help? Well, you could volunteer. You can type  up a book if you’re feeling really ambitious or you can proofread as much or as little as you can handle. Most importantly, download these books, read them, share them them, review them, talk about them, love them. After all, they belong to you already.

In the next installation: Creative Commons (rethinking copyright and fair use).