Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Sony Reader, continued


I figured out some of the answers about making free books work on my Sony Reader (information that Sony doesn't make easy to find, as they want you to buy books from their bookstore). Fairly few ebook sites offer the Sony format (Manybooks is the most valuable exception). But more offer RichText (.rtf) format, such as the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, and that works very nicely on the Sony reader, including the ability to adjust font size. On Project Gutenberg, many books are available only in text (.txt) format. I bought a program to translate text format to RichText format, and it is easy to use and works beautifully. I don't know how it would handle footnotes, but it takes out the annoying hard line breaks. So now I have access to all 20,000 books in Project Gutenberg. Gutenberg Australia has books that are out of copyright in Australia, where standard copyright is 50 years, but not yet in the U.S., where it is 70 years.

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