The Sentimental Bloke, by C.J. Dennis

It’s Australia Day here, so I wanted to publish something quintessentially Australian by way of celebration. The Magic Puddingwould have been good, but it’s still under copyright. And I’d already published For the term of his natural life, a grim tale of convict life, which in any event would not be a cheerful celebration.

So finally, after two or three minutes of careful deliberation, I decided upon The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke, by  C. J. Dennis. This is a tale — in verse — of a likely lad from Sydney, who is reformed when he meets, woos and marries the love of his life, Doreen.

Beautifully illustrated by Hal Gye.

Happy Australia Day!

All our books now available for your eReader*

I’m excited! Because, after a huge effort last week, all of our eBooks can now be downloaded (uploaded?) to an eReader device* that supports the ePub standard, including Sony, BeBook, Bookeen, B&N nook, and — my favourite — the iPhone (using Stanza).

Just navigate our web site to the author page listing the title you want, then click on the green download button to download the zip file. The zip conforms to the ePub standard so should be recognised by your device. Note that I don’t actually have any of these devices to play with, so please let me know if there are “issues”. It does work well with Stanza on the iPhone.

* Sorry Kindle users: you should have bought a device that supports open standards.

Kindle and the future of reading : The New Yorker

Interesting article here from Nicholson Baker of the New Yorker, presenting a somewhat different view of the Kindle:

Kindle and the future of reading : The New Yorker.

Oscar Wilde, 1854-1900

Well, we’re having a heat-wave in Adelaide, and it was too hot all weekend to go outside. The good news is that it gave me time to add more ebooks to our site! I already had a collection of Oscar Wilde‘s poetry. New titles added this weekend include The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the two collections of fables, The Happy Prince and A House of Pomegranates.

(Personally, I find the Happy Prince to be a rather miserable story, as is the Nightingale and the Rose. But The Fisherman and his Soul is an extraordinary tale which resonated well with me.)

The Happy Prince is also beautifully illustrated by Charles Robinson. In fact it took me hours of work to get the images properly aligned, so you’d better appreciate it!

After doing all that, I then set to work on Wilde’s play,Salomé. Although there were copies of the original French version of the play available online, I could not find a version in English, as an ebook. So I made one — we now have Salomé : A Tragedy in One Act, featuring the very nice illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley, the master of Art Nouveau illustration.

Which, finally, led me to also create The Art of Aubrey Beardsley, with an introduction by Arthur Symons and 64 illustrations.

As always, I welcome your feedback. (And a cool change in the weather, please!)

A new look for the new year; or, What I did on my holidays!

To celebrate the new year, I’ve given the eBooks@Adelaide site a new look. Not a major change to the site, but a slightly fresher and cleaner look. The most significant change was mentioned in my precious post: the author pages now use mini icons for the links to individual books, indicating the link to read (on screen), print (or view complete text) and download (a zip archive file). Where the link is to a file or page on another site, I’ve used a link icon.

I’ve also updated and refreshed every author page, so that they all contain at least a brief biography and a portrait of the author (where available). It can be difficult finding photographs of those ancient Greeks!

And of course I’ve continued updating individual books, and adding new titles. We now have more that 1600 titles available!

As always, I welcome your feedback.