Ebook Index of Free Ebooks for the Kindle
February 18, 2013 10:57 PM Subscribe
Ebook Index of Free Ebooks for the Kindle
My parents got a Kindle for Christmas, and I've looked into ways for them to read public domain books from outside Amazon on it, and the interfaces for browsing for books and transferring them are ... non-optimal. I found the Magic Catalog, an ebook index of Project Gutenberg books, linked up so that you can immediately download books and add them to your Kindle, without using a computer or Amazon. It's in a useless order, though – it's not sorted by the book title, or by author. So I thought I'd take a shot at fixing that. Here’s the prototype, sorted by the author's last name. This is my first ebook, so please forgive the rough edges.
My parents got a Kindle for Christmas, and I've looked into ways for them to read public domain books from outside Amazon on it, and the interfaces for browsing for books and transferring them are ... non-optimal. I found the Magic Catalog, an ebook index of Project Gutenberg books, linked up so that you can immediately download books and add them to your Kindle, without using a computer or Amazon. It's in a useless order, though – it's not sorted by the book title, or by author. So I thought I'd take a shot at fixing that. Here’s the prototype, sorted by the author's last name. This is my first ebook, so please forgive the rough edges.
Role: hacker
This project was posted to MetaFilter by aniola on March 9, 2013: Ebook Index of Free Ebooks for the Kindle
I made major revisions, to the formatting and to the data. The authors’ names were mangled in spots.
posted by Pronoiac at 10:52 AM on February 20, 2013
posted by Pronoiac at 10:52 AM on February 20, 2013
Update!
* New chapter: The most popular ebook downloads from the past month.
* Titles are sorted properly, ignoring stop words like a, an, and the.
* I removed most long subtitles. (This removed about a third of the pagecount.)
* There’s cover art again.
* I removed a problematic apostrophe from the filename. If you couldn't download, try again.
posted by Pronoiac at 1:24 AM on March 7, 2013 [2 favorites]
* New chapter: The most popular ebook downloads from the past month.
* Titles are sorted properly, ignoring stop words like a, an, and the.
* I removed most long subtitles. (This removed about a third of the pagecount.)
* There’s cover art again.
* I removed a problematic apostrophe from the filename. If you couldn't download, try again.
posted by Pronoiac at 1:24 AM on March 7, 2013 [2 favorites]
I just learned about this from the podcast, and yay! This is great!
posted by grapesaresour at 9:24 PM on March 7, 2013
posted by grapesaresour at 9:24 PM on March 7, 2013
NB. If you put a .htaccess file in the same directory as the eBook, with the following contents:
(Details of advice may vary with your choice of web server, but the mime type is the important thing.)
posted by pharm at 7:47 AM on March 10, 2013
AddType application/x-mobipocket-ebook mobithen people will be able to download the link straight from their Kindles.
(Details of advice may vary with your choice of web server, but the mime type is the important thing.)
posted by pharm at 7:47 AM on March 10, 2013
I had no idea, pharm! It needed ".mobi" instead of "mobi" but it's working now. Thanks!
posted by Pronoiac at 11:31 AM on March 10, 2013
posted by Pronoiac at 11:31 AM on March 10, 2013
I just posted an updated version, with details on the blog and copied on the Mefi thread.
posted by Pronoiac at 1:33 AM on March 14, 2013
posted by Pronoiac at 1:33 AM on March 14, 2013
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posted by labnol at 12:08 AM on February 19, 2013 [1 favorite]