Put a thousand books from the British Library on your iPad for free | Hacker News Reader

Put a thousand books from the British Library on your iPad for free

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66 pointsshawndumas29 comments

Awesome, but for those of use without an iPad, there is still www.gutenberg.org. They don't have that many beautiful illustrations, but they have far, far more literature and they are all in text files.

  http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1342 Pride and Prejudiced
  http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28054 The Brothers Karamazov
  http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1524 Hamlet
  http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28233 Sir Isaac Newtons Principa mathematica
  http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14986 Experimental Research in electricity by Michael Faraday
  http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/215 Jack Londons call of the wild
  http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/103 Around the world in 80 days
  http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3748 A Journey to the center of the earth

And countless others, including Benjamin Franklins autobiography [http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/148].

The only sad things is that there are more books there than I will ever have time to read.

It would be great if Gutenberg had a nice, polished app browser interface like this. I've loaded a bunch of stuff from Gutenberg on my iPad but the process is pretty clunky.

There is an app called something like Eucalytus which is designed to integrate with Gutenberg and which renders the books stunningly beautifully. It is designed by somebody with a streak of OCD so when you turn the page they snap in but they also react as actual paper would with regards to speed, number and points of curl, etc.

I don't know if there is an iPad edition, but it is really good for iPhone.

Also, I find it hard to find stuff that I want. You can browse the top hundred titles, or you can browse every damn title in the system, but the in-between ground is iffy.

Isn't the Project Gutenberg catalog available on the iBooks store? (Here in Austria it's the only thing on there. Thank's very much publishing cartels...)

I applaud efforts like this one, because if the fashion of looking at books in their original layout catches on maybe I'll finally be able to buy an ebook with decent typography.

The average ebook is appallingly ugly, and poorly proofread to boot. Typographers and publishers have known how to fix this problem for several centuries -- it's striking how nice the typesetting looks in a printed book from 1830 -- but apparently ebook technology is too primitive to assist them, or maybe it's just that nobody has been able to afford to take the time, since there has never been any money in ebooks before. This can be fixed and it should be fixed.

Wait, isn't the average ebook just text, rendered by your reader?

Exactly. Typography is a difficult and subtle craft which is not that easily emulated by algorithms. Knuth was able to do a pretty good job. The programmers responsible for most of today's eBook text-rendering & layout engines apparently aren't.

I think people are missing the point here. This is for bibliophiles not readers. Those interested in "just the text files" probably want the Book of Kells w/o the calligraphy...

Now, that's a lot of books. I'm sure it'll be great to procrastinate on those.

Just today Sebastian Marshall sent his weekly newsletter[1] about targeted procrastination. Here's how it could be adapted for reading some of these books:

- Write down two or three topics that you're interested in.

- Do a search for books that match those subjects, and write them down.

- When you feel like taking a break, pick one book from the list, and start reading.

I like this approach because I easily get tired from reading a book for a long time, but it's easy to do it in 10-15 minute chunks.

I'm not the type that reads lots of books anymore, but I prefer that over lurking on Facebook or Twitter.

[1] http://getsomevictory.com/

Is there a list of the books somewhere?

http://pressandpolicy.bl.uk/Press-Releases/BiblioLabs-and-th...

I'd rather have a thousand text files which are platform portable.

> I'd rather have a thousand text files

Then you are certainly not the target audience.

"The books have been scanned in high resolution and color so you can see the engraved illustrations, the beauty of the embossed covers, along with maps and even the texture of the paper the books were printed on."

A better quip would involve PNG files.

Text files and PNG files then for the images then.

What people don't realise is that the content is important and the format is not.

many would disagree with that - the medium certainly effects and at the least contextualizes a message... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message

I'd suggest two things are of value in this app: firstly, the the "format" of these particular editions, and, secondly, their curation as an app.

If you want to read "Excursions in Madeira and Porto Santo", by T. Edward Bowdich, Esq. (one of the books), then archive.org has an excellent copy, here:

http://www.archive.org/details/excursionsinmade01bowd

However, you probably would never read such a book. You may, however, browse through the version included with the British Library app. The BL version is a very nice edition, with colour plates. More importantly, the BL version is presented as part of a collection of interesting old books, which means that a lot more people will be reading about Mr. Bowdich, Esq.'s adventures this weekend than would normally be doing so.

The presentation of the books is of general interest. By contrast, the actual text content of the book is of very specialised interest, and the (decontextualised) pictures not much less so.

Format is very important.

The problem is that there are now a pile more mediums to deliver the message on depending on how much you can afford to pay out.

The information should be uniformly available to all, which I believe is the point of the British Library.

However, having been there a number of times, it's a pain in the arse to use the BL anyway and copying anything for reference (like you used to do down your local library) is virtually impossible now. So it's literally sit and copy the work out.

format is important in order to make sense of content.

I'm sure right now they have a huge database with lots of scanned images, and an app like this helps to make sense of it. If I'd have a big zip file containing all those books, it would be difficult to browse through them. They said they're planning to add support for other devices, so you may still get what you want one day.

Text files take away the writer's intent. "To Sherlock Holmes, she is always be the woman." That is a rare instance of Conan Doyle using italics. And he meant it.

Put another way, why has the UK taxpayer-funded BL made its initial offering only for Apple customers?

Probably the same reason the UK license-fee-funded BBC initially supported iPlayer on Windows only - it's the most popular tablet platform (or so I believe). The Kindle\Android flavours are apparently on their way, let's give them a chance eh.

However there are totally open formats which you could use on all platforms...

I'm not sure the popularity of the iPad is actually as high as everyone thinks. I think that's the Apple marketing reality distortion field. I see WAY more Kindles and Android phones than I see iPhones and iPads on trains in and out of London where I live.

The iPad is by far the most popular tablet and still makes up over 50% of the market. The iPhone is a vary popular phone, but there are far more options for phones out there than tablets.

Incorrect. It makes up 50% of the SALES of an unclearly defined MARKET and term TABLET.

Forget 50%. iPad has 53 TIMES the online usage of the nearest competitor:

http://mashable.com/2011/06/02/ipad-web-usage/

Your certainty that reality is otherwise seems to be in want of a citation.

Mashable as a citation... whatever next.

Define "competitor" and "popularity". It's all damn lies and statistics.

My old Windows tablet could be a competitor. Dell do a tablet Windows machine. Motorola do a hybrid device. Is an ebook reader a tablet? Is an iPod touch a tablet?

Perhaps people with iPads hammer web sites? Perhaps people without iPads don't? Perhaps some mobile browsers identify themselves as desktop ones?

There is no defined taxonomy to classify things in either.

It's all pirates vs global warming.

Every time I read about the BL they're doing something inanely anti-web, though usually Microsoft-centric, like putting interesting audio online as .WMA files, or buiding things in silverlight that would have been as easilydone in javascript, or supporting OOXML for fast-track ISO standardisation.

Spot on.

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