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

http://www.tuaw.com/2011/06/12/put-a-thousand-books-from-the-british-library-on-your-ipad-for-f/

by shawndumas • 15 years ago

66 29 15 years ago

tuaw.com

hugh33• 15 years ago

Is there a list of the books somewhere?

chrisjsmith7• 15 years ago

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

wzdd2• 15 years ago

> 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.

chrisjsmith7• 15 years ago

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.

vixen99• 15 years ago

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

oscardelben2• 15 years ago

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/

tomjen32• 15 years ago

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.

cageface• 15 years ago

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.

tomjen32• 15 years ago

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.

hugh33• 15 years ago

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.

schrototo2• 15 years ago

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...)

jleyank• 15 years ago

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...

mechanical_fish• 15 years ago

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.

hugh33• 15 years ago

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

schrototo2• 15 years ago

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.

za• 15 years ago

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

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

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