BLITZES at bltcpress

.. experience outage Sunday December 11; forced reboot by AWS which yours truly was not quite on top of, should be fine now.

Founder of Project Gutenberg Obituary:

Finally tweaked the site so that the “new” method of directly fetching books from books.google.com is the default/standard way of doing conversion. The original download/upload interface remains available at http://www.retroread.com/gbif/

Enjoy and please advise if there are any issues!

… things have been a bit quiet here and also, RetroRead update-wise. Pleased to see things are apparently (plus or minus an Amazon EC2 blackout) running pretty smoothly, in particulalry with “Retro Rocket”. I hope everyone is using this, it is due to switch over to the default “creation” option (when I get time — things in land of “day job” have been a bit demanding …).

Now what?

OK, this is how I always wanted the RetroRead experience to be — you simply point at a search result on Google, and bam! it’s converted, all in the background, no file downloading.

It’s a little tricky, particularly since Google really expects a human behind the wheel of a browser to interact with their download urls. After a while of repeated downloads from the same url, they begin to suspect that someone is “crawling” the site. Not so here – every download request is triggered individually by a user at a browser;only, the request is “proxied” through the RetroRead servers so that it can be delivered at high speed to the target conversion service, rather than downloaded and re-uploaded at “last mile” speeds. There is still a little latency, but “more or less” — all you need to do is click, and either the book is queued for conversion right away, or (as we recommend), queued for “editing” of the extraneous front matter. It’s really a dream!

Searching Google’s book library is done through a Google Books feed search, and only titles with epub downloads are returned in the search results. There is also a nifty “preview” feature — click on the title and a “Google Books Preview” view is displayed.

If the site gets busy, you may be asked to enter a “Captcha” response — this is Google’s way of making sure there really is human there.

Happy converting (I mean EDITING and converting).

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been working on the “next step” in the RetroRead service — the ability to directly move books from Google into the conversion workflow, without having to download them to your desktop. It’s pretty neat, and *super* fast — search, edit, and go!

This requires a bit of care and a few tricks to try and stay on the good side of Google’s throttling features. I’d like to get a little more field testing done before just turning it loose (to ultimately replace the Google search in iframe implementation).

Just send us a note at info@retroread.com, we’ll sign you up and show you how to access this new feature.

Just posted a walk-through video of the flow of searching, downloading, uploading, and editing of a Google epub through RetroRead into Kindle format.

Hope it encourages more users to take the plunge and do some of their own conversions!

It’s available on the RetroRead site here.