General

Re: (Semi-)Official Mises.org EPUB Release Topic

Drew — Fri, 10 May 2013 15:54:58 GMT

Much thanks to Tex, whose work has been phenomenal. Look out for increasingly more EPUBs being made available for download on Mises.org.

Cheers!

Re: (Semi-)Official Mises.org EPUB Release Topic

Smiling Dave — Fri, 10 May 2013 10:58:23 GMT

Myhuman, that copy is awesome. Thank you.

Re: (Semi-)Official Mises.org EPUB Release Topic

Tex2002ans — Fri, 10 May 2013 10:06:59 GMT

Today was quite productive, I finished official work on a redone EPUB of "The Historical Setting of the Austrian School of Economics" by Ludwig von Mises. (just need a little Quality Checking (QC)), and it should be posted up soon. :)

I also see that Libertarian Forum with tons of code fixes/optimizations/typo corrections got posted a few days ago.

I also just did a lot of organizing/renaming of files which will help me in the long-run.

adam cruz:
Congrats and keep up the good work..

Thank you, I shall. :)

myhumangetsme:
Try this copy.

Fantastic, looks like a MUCH cleaner scan, and it has those missing pages that Smiling Dave mentioned. You have saved me many hours of my life. I just finished cleaning it up, and will begin the OCR soon.

As a side note, I sent you an email about the Jevons book, please let me know if you recieved it.

Re: (Semi-)Official Mises.org EPUB Release Topic

myhumangetsme — Fri, 10 May 2013 05:18:43 GMT

Tex2002ans:
Smiling Dave:
Tex,

Could you convert http://mises.org/books/kates.pdf?

I know there is a missing page in there, any way you could find it?

I will toss that on my list, give it a few weeks. Wow that scan is bad though!

Try this copy.

Re: (Semi-)Official Mises.org EPUB Release Topic

Smiling Dave — Fri, 10 May 2013 02:35:57 GMT

The missing page is page 152 of the printed book, 160 of the PDF file.

Instead there appears page 150 of the printed book on page 160 of the PDF file.

In other words, the pages that show up are 1-149, 150, 151, 150 again instead of 152, 153 etc

Re: (Semi-)Official Mises.org EPUB Release Topic

Tex2002ans — Fri, 10 May 2013 00:52:08 GMT

Smiling Dave:
Tex,

Could you convert http://mises.org/books/kates.pdf?

I know there is a missing page in there, any way you could find it?

I will toss that on my list, give it a few weeks. Wow that scan is bad though! If you could tell me what page is missing, I can put in a request for getting a scan of the missing page.

limitgov:
Kindles cannot handle epub files.

Indeed, Amazon uses proprietary formats for their ebooks. The older Kindles used the MOBI format, while newer Kindles support KF8 (I believe Kindle 3 with a firmware update, and any Kindles newer than that).

MOBI is a horrible format, while KF8 has almost exactly the same functionality of an EPUB, but is proprietary.

limitgov:
When you convert the epub to mobi using something like Calibre, does it change the formatting at all?

EPUB to MOBI, yes, there is the potential (because the MOBI format is garbage). EPUB to KF8, you should be ok (KF8 is pretty much an EPUB inside).

But as John James mentioned, the way that I build the EPUBs, I use very minimal CSS which should convert perfectly fine. I try to make the books work on the maximum possible amount of devices, with an eye towards any future file formats. When you start getting spaghetti code and convoluted CSS, this leads to more potential areas of breaking in conversion.

Also, since MOBI/KF8 are proprietary, the Calibre conversion for those formats were all "reverse engineered". There is no guarantee that it will convert 100% Amazon friendly (although they try to do their best).

limitgov:
That is what i'm afraid of. That some of the formatting will be lost when I convert an epub to mobi. That is why I always try to download mobi files for my kindle.

I guarantee you that 95%+ of any (non-self-published) ebooks purchased from Amazon were BUILT FROM AN EPUB. The way that it currently works is, you design an EPUB, then you feed it into Amazon's proprietary converter (Kindlegen), or feed it to Amazon (who runs it through a near-Kindlegen program on their servers). Kindlegen generates a MOBI/KF8 file, which Amazon then sells and sends to the Kindle users.

Then the companies sell the original EPUB version they created in every other store.

limitgov:
So, epub is the open source format? Do nooks support epub fully?

Pretty much every single ereader out there is EPUB. Only Kindles are MOBI/KF8.

EPUB is an open format. The dumb way to explain it is that EPUB is "XHTML in a special zip file". You can take the EPUB apart, and you get the EXACT HTML + CSS. Sort of like if you said "View Source" on a website.

MOBI/KF8 are "compiled" formats. You feed your code through, and it tries to translate all of the XHTML + CSS into some crappy subset (compresses images if they are too large, resizes images if too large, removes unsupported CSS, etc. etc.). Sort of like if you looked at a Binary program in a Hex Editor.

Sure, you could use a decompiler and maybe figure out SOME code, but you won't be able to get the exact original code.

limitgov:
I also wish it supported pdf's in a better way.

Most of these ereaders are too small to handle PDF well. You might have luck with this (I never used this program before):

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=144711

I try to avoid PDF like the plague now. I just try to convert everything I can into EPUB. In my opinion, it is just WAY better for reading (and all of the indirect benefits as well, such as easy copy/pastability/searching/converting to other future formats).

Re: (Semi-)Official Mises.org EPUB Release Topic

myhumangetsme — Fri, 10 May 2013 00:15:38 GMT

If you have a Kindle Fire you can sideload any EPUB reading app, including Nook.

Re: (Semi-)Official Mises.org EPUB Release Topic

John James — Thu, 09 May 2013 18:00:46 GMT

limitgov:
So, epub is the open source format? Do nooks support epub fully?

Perhaps you could look at the link I included for you. Particularly this section.

Re: (Semi-)Official Mises.org EPUB Release Topic

limitgov — Thu, 09 May 2013 17:36:50 GMT

"That's why Kindles suck."

Someone got me my kindle a while back. I'll be honest...its been great, except for the lack of epub support.

So, epub is the open source format? Do nooks support epub fully?

That is lame that amazon is not supporting a very popular ebook standard. But, I'm stuck with it.

I also wish it supported pdf's in a better way.

Re: (Semi-)Official Mises.org EPUB Release Topic

John James — Thu, 09 May 2013 17:02:02 GMT

limitgov:
Kindles cannot handle epub files.

That's why Kindles suck.

When you convert the epub to mobi using something like Calibre, does it change the formatting at all? That is what i'm afraid of. That some of the formatting will be lost when I convert an epub to mobi. That is why I always try to download mobi files for my kindle.

Well it's the best option you have if you insist on using restrictive technology like the Kindle. (Unless of course you wish to buy all the titles you want to read from Amazon in their crappy proprietary format). Any formatting alterations that occur during conversion should be as minimal as possible, with the extensive and detailed way Tex goes about creating the epubs.

But yes, there are no guarantees you'll get a quality output after the conversion. That's just the nature of propriety file formats. (And that's just the files themselves. We're not even talking about the hoops that come with everyone using their own DRM scheme.)

My recommendation: ditch the Amazon technology and send them a note saything they lost a customer because of their petulant resistence to an open standard, and assholish insistence on restrictive technology and sales practices.

Re: (Semi-)Official Mises.org EPUB Release Topic

limitgov — Thu, 09 May 2013 14:08:55 GMT

Kindles cannot handle epub files.

When you convert the epub to mobi using something like Calibre, does it change the formatting at all? That is what i'm afraid of. That some of the formatting will be lost when I convert an epub to mobi. That is why I always try to download mobi files for my kindle.

Re: (Semi-)Official Mises.org EPUB Release Topic

Smiling Dave — Thu, 09 May 2013 11:24:59 GMT

Tex,

Could you convert http://mises.org/books/kates.pdf?

I know there is a missing page in there, any way you could find it?

Re: (Semi-)Official Mises.org EPUB Release Topic

adam cruz — Thu, 09 May 2013 11:01:24 GMT

Congrats and keep up the good work..

Re: (Semi-)Official Mises.org EPUB Release Topic

Tex2002ans — Thu, 09 May 2013 09:51:51 GMT

I just completed converting an official Mises EPUB:

The Gold Standard: Perspectives in the Austrian School edited by Lew Rockwell

It will be tweaked in the coming days (need a high resolution cover image, plus most likely some tiny tweaks here and there). Should be up officially on Mises soon, but if you want to read the text, my version should be good to go. :)

Unofficial:

Interpretations of the Wicksellian Idea by Robert Bradley Jr.

I just randomly picked that book out of the PDFs and decided to convert it. The PDF is missing page 44, so I put in a request for that... hopefully the original is still around somewhere and can be scanned.

myhumangetsme:
On the topic of freely available books, it'd be nice if we could get some of the online versions of books by Julian Simon into EPUB format. I'd also love to see the books of Richard Mitchell in a quality EPUB format, but as he's merely a fellow traveler in certain circles it's a far off wish.

I pulled all of the files on both sites, and took a quick look at them. The Richard Mitchell ones might be ok, although the code behind the site looks EXTREMELY poor (might take me some time to create regex to clean it up, they are all sitting in tables).

The Julian Simon site is just ATROCIOUS. The files are in "preformatted" text documents, with the formatting done as spaces... and there are carriage returns/line breaks everywhere. It will be a complete pain in the butt to convert. PLUS, I noticed lots of errors in the text, and it is missing the images (looks like in a lot of his works there are lots of diagrams). Would probably be a lot less work to just work from scratch! It makes me sad when there are really crappy conversions like that.

These book conversions should be done ONCE correctly, so it will not have to be done ever again. Then then books can live on until time immemorial. :)

Re: (Semi-)Official Mises.org EPUB Release Topic

Tex2002ans — Tue, 07 May 2013 00:44:15 GMT

I just completed an EPUB of:

Leviathan in Crisis by Waldo Ralph Browne

from the Archive.org version here: http://archive.org/details/leviathanincrisi00brow

I created a much cleaner/smaller PDF (also made it B&W). Although who would use that when you have the great EPUB version. :)

I put in the request for it to be put up on Mises.org (hopefully that gets accepted), but as always, it is sitting up on my site for now.

I do not know who requested it originally, but the PDF was sitting in one of my folders for a long time, so someone on the forums must have requested it.

fegeldolfy:
Thanks.

Welcome.