« Reading List: Jeeves and the Wedding Bells | Main | Reading List: Microlaunchers »
Saturday, January 4, 2014
Tom Swift and His Motor-Cycle updated, EPUB releases begin
Now that all 25 of the public domain Tom Swift novels have been posted in the Tom Swift and His Pocket Library collection, I am returning to the earlier novels, which I began to post in 2005, upgrading them to use the more modern typography of those I've done in the last few years. The first to be upgraded is the first novel in the series, Tom Swift and His Motor-Cycle. A number of typographical errors which slipped through the original production process have been corrected, and Unicode text entities are used for special characters such as single and double quotes and dashes. Concurrent with the posting of this updated edition, I have added EPUB editions of sixteen of the Tom Swift novels. EPUB documents may be read with a wide variety of reading devices and applications, including Apple's iBooks and the Barnes & Noble Nook. I will post EPUBs of the remaining nine novels as I revise and update them. The EPUB editions are created automatically from XHTML Web documents by a special purpose utility. (It is only useful for books in the format of these novels; I am therefore not posting the source code as it wouldn't be useful for other documents.) It is possible to automatically convert EPUB format to the .mobi format used by the Amazon Kindle, but when I convert these documents (with three different tools, none of which reports an error in conversion), the table of contents does not appear, at least on the Kindle application for the iPad. (Oddly, the table of contents displays just fine when the .mobi file is opened in the Calibre desktop reader application.) I am deferring posting .mobi editions of these books until this mystery is resolved.Posted at January 4, 2014 00:03