To read a book on your PDA, you need to get the file into a format that your reader software understands. Each PDA reader program will work only with a specific format of file. Some will read several formats, but, in general, it's a jungle of competing options.
Unless you use a Rocket or REB1100, you will need to install at least one reader program, and many veteran readers install two or three to deal with different formats. There are many of them available. In an internal poll mid-2002 of Gutenberg volunteers who use PDAs,
| C Spot Run | <http://www.32768.com/bill/palmos/cspotrun/index.html>, |
| Mobipocket | <http://www.mobipocket.com>, |
| PalmReader | <http://www.peanutpress.com/> |
| Plucker | <http://www.plkr.org> |
were our favored choices for reader programs.
Further, the process may be different depending on which reader software you're using. Each format that a reader understands has one or more converter programs that run on your PC, and turn the plain text file into that format. So in general, you have to:
1. Download the PG text
2. Edit the text for the layout the converter wants (often HTML).
3. Use the converter to create a file of the format the reader wants.
4. Transfer the converted file to your PDA.
If all this sounds too complicated, remember that many people take and convert PG texts into many formats, and offer them for download from their sites. Of course, there is no guarantee that someone will have converted the particular eBook you want, but there are lots of options. Try Blackmask <http://www.blackmask.com>, which lists thousands of texts already converted for Mobipocket, iSilo, RocketBook and the Microsoft Reader.
There are many other sites that serve pre-converted PG texts.
MemoWare <http://www.memoware.com> is also a useful resource for converted eBooks, and has lots of information, including an excellent map of the readers and formats jungle at <http://www.memoware.com/mw.cgi/?screen=help_format>
Steve Sakoman's site at http://www.sakoman.net/ takes plain texts from PG and produced automated conversions to HTML and PalmDOC PDB.
If you're "rolling your own", you'll probably need to convert our plain texts to HTML at some point, because a lot of converters require HTML as input, and this is a common theme in readers' explanations of how they get texts onto their PDAs. Don't panic! You don't have to be a HTML wizard to do this--in fact, you don't need to know anything about HTML at all! Usually, it's just a matter of removing some line ends and Saving As HTML. You won't get a lot of fancy markup, or images out of thin air, but you will get the book.
One of the main things you usually have to do in making HTML is unwrap the lines. If you're making your HTML manually, this is usually done by replacing two paragraph marks with some nonsense marker like @@Z@@, replacing all single paragraph marks with a space, and replacing the nonsense marker with a paragraph mark. After unwrapping, the text can just be Saved As HTML.
This has the drawback that lines that shouldn't be wrapped--like poetry, tables or letter headings, will be wrapped. You may have to go through the text and add extra line breaks for these.
There are some applications that specifically assist with auto-converting text into HTML:
GutenMark <http://www.sandroid.org/GutenMark> was specifically written for the purpose, and knows enough about PG conventions to do a very good job.
InterParse <http://www.interparse.com> is a Windows-based generic text parser that is very easy and intuitive to use.
The World Wide Web Consortium lists some other options at <http://www.w3.org/Tools/Misc_filters.html>
If you're using a RocketBook or REB1100, you don't have either the choices or the confusion to deal with. One of our volunteers who uses a RocketBook offered this recipe for getting a PG text onto a RocketBook:
On converting to Rocket:
This sounds long, but it usually takes me under three minutes except for a very long text. I've never taken longer than five minutes. You can just go in and pick up the text file with Rocket Librarian, but what you get onscreen doing this looks very odd. Steps 2-7 are not essential, and if I'm in a hurry to read something once I might skip them, but if it's something I know I want to keep I use them.
This formula is not ideal for poetry or blank verse--if you want to keep the lines unwrapped, you should avoid removing the paragraph marks.
Another volunteer, who reads on Mobipocket <http://www.mobipocket.com> offered this suggestion:
I use the MobiPocket Publisher, available free from www.mobipocket.com. It wants to take a HTML file as input, so the first thing I have to do is convert my PG text to HTML.
I usually do this by running GutenMark, available at <http://www.sandroid.org/GutenMark>. I can also do it in Microsoft Word using the following sequence:
GutenMark does a better job of converting to HTML than my simple Word formula, since it recognizes standard PG features, and sometimes Mobipocket doesn't like the HTML produced from Word--it complains of a missing file, or doesn't recognize quotation marks.
Having got my HTML file, I open Mobipocket Publisher, choose "Project Gutenberg", Add the File I created, and just Publish it to MobiPocket .PRC format. Then I pick it up on my iPaq the next time I sync. The whole process takes two or three minutes, and the results, since I discovered GutenMark, are good.
I recently came across InterParse 4 at <http://www.interparse.com>. It doesn't have the built-in knowledge of GutenMark, so the results aren't as good, but it's really easy to use, and you can see the effect of your changes onscreen as you do it. For most PG books, all you have to do is just Open the text file and choose Options / Remove all CRLFs (Except at Paragraph End), then Convert / Text to HTML and Save As the HTML filename you want. Quick and painless.