BLITZES at bltcpress » google books http://www.blitzesblog.com notes from acting out my wannabe publisher fantasy Mon, 12 Dec 2011 05:18:02 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 re: retroread http://www.blitzesblog.com/2010/03/22/re-retroread/ http://www.blitzesblog.com/2010/03/22/re-retroread/#comments Tue, 23 Mar 2010 02:51:15 +0000 david http://blitzes.bltcpress.com/2010/03/22/re-retroread/ Continue reading →]]> My current front burner project has been the development of www.retroread.com, a site which allows Kindle owners to easily convert epubs from the vast library of public domain works scanned by Google and have them show up on their Kindle.

I’m a little bewildered however that among the 50 odd folk who have registered for it so far, almost none of them have actually used it to convert books for themselves.

This suggests three possible explanations: 1.) The site is too complicated, and people don’t know what to do once they register (or, alternatively, they get bored trying to figure out what to do); 2.) The Google collection is so vast and overwhelming, that people don’t know where to start; 3.) “Most” people aren’t really that interested in non-classic works (i. e., works that you can’t already get for free from Project Gutenberg, etc.) published before 1923.

Possibly all of the above … it’s on my “things to do” list to record a Camtasia video walking users through the steps.

I’m also somewhat trying to publicize a little better … last week I added a link from the Wikipedia “Kindle” entry, and I’m trying to run a Google AdWords campaign, but my Ad is in “review” for the last two weeks because I use the Kindle and Google trademarks …

We’ll see what happens.

]]> http://www.blitzesblog.com/2010/03/22/re-retroread/feed/ 0 Google Books for the Kindle http://www.blitzesblog.com/2010/03/08/google-books-for-the-kindle/ http://www.blitzesblog.com/2010/03/08/google-books-for-the-kindle/#comments Tue, 09 Mar 2010 05:03:17 +0000 david http://blitzes.bltcpress.com/2010/03/08/google-books-for-the-kindle/ Continue reading →]]> Whilst the BLTC editorial calendar has been somewhat slow lately, I’ve been active launching another vehicle that opens up access to all of the hundreds of thousands (or possibly millions) of public domain books scanned by Google. For close to a year now, they have been making these available not for download, not only as a PDF of the original scanned images (in other words, as a graphic image of the text), but as a intelligent but brute-force scan into an epub format file.

epub is probably the coming standard, but for now (why …?) it is not supported by Kindle, nor has Google “reached out” and provided support for the native Kindle mobi format. Another boring standards war by two internet colossi who clearly see each other as primary competitors in the ebook space (whatever happened to Google’s epub business anyway …?).

Anyway, visit www.retroread.com, and you will be able to create an account through which you may upload any
Google epub, and have it converted and forwarded directly to your Kindle. It’s pretty neat! The quality of the converted book can vary greatly depending on the quality of Google’s OCR conversion. On average, generally readable.

The conversion technology used to power the site is, unsurprisingly, Kovid Goyal’s Calibre engine, instrumented into a web service. The hosting of the conversion engine is, btw, Amazon’s very own “Elastic Compute Cloud” — if this gets really big, I can scale it to infinity! (A friend suggested I host the front end using Google’s app engine, but that would have required learning Python. It would have completed the symmetry, however.)

Anyway, if you find this post, please check out www.retroread.com!

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