I briefly noted some palm ebook resources. Motivated by curiosity I purchased the Mark Twain set – it weighs in at about 8mb, and, yes, it appears to be the actual complete works of Mark Twain.

I know, of course, that the material for the Twain books – and most of the rest of the free classics available digitally – had come from Project Gutenberg, the repository for textual materials in the public domain. Which led me to some pondering.

Last year, my wife read the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy aloud – I had refused to provide her with plot details and this way we were able to share the experience before the second film arrived. The experience was very successful within our relationship, and we immediately began casting about for other books to read in this way.

We tried some postwar fantasy and SF, with no luck. So we tried the Fagles Illiad and Odyssey, to no avail. We haven’t tackled the Odyssey yet, but the Illiad is as boring as reading transcripts of the play-by-play at a football game. I suppose it might be of historical interest if you like the game – war, in this case.

Stanza after stanza of the heritage of this or that violent princeling followed by said princeling’s brutal death. Who cares? Not me, lemme tell ya.

Still, I have hopes for the Odyssey. Less endless killing, more clever tomfoolery, one is led to believe.

But alas! What to read?

Hm, sez I. Movie led to book, earlier. Hm. Isn’t there another recent film that takes some inspiration from classic adventure literature?

Seems to me that Treasure Island ought to be available for the Palm?

Happily, there are a fair number of other books in the genre, as well.

All that’s needed is a conversion utility. I saw a Perl one somewhere but didn’t bookmark, darn it.

One thought on “More on Palm ebooks

  1. The conversion utility I use for the ebooks on my site is simply one I whipped up in PHP, that converts the Gutenberg etexts to PML format. You still need to do some QA on the finished file, but otherwise it works pretty well. I run it as a Windows command-line utility all the time. If you’re interested, I’ll send it over to you.

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