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. 
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I used Stanza on iPhone to find songs.zip but
Import Failed
Failed to download and import ‘songs.zip’. Unable to translate ‘songs.zip’ for import. Required container .xml file missing from zip: /private/var/mobile/Applications/677848A9-5008-42CB-AC75-5620DCB83A1F/tmp/Downloads/download-1
Thanks for your efforts.
cheers,
pat
Ah! My fault. I’ve rebuilt the zip file and it now works. (Assuming The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke)
That’s great! I have some HTML format books from your site that I want to import into my brand new iPad for use with Apple’s iBooks app, which supports ePub. It was nice to see that I can re-download the books in ePub.
There seem to be some incompatibilities in the formatting, though. The books do open in iBooks, but in most of them that I’ve tried, all the formatting is lost, so there are no chapter breaks or italics, just a big mass of text.
With some experimentation, I think I’ve found the problem, and I was able to fix one book (Lovecraft’s “The Call Of Cthulhu”.) I noticed that the outer HTML tag in the problematic books was missing its XML namespace declaration, so I added it and re-zipped the book.
I’m afraid to use angle brackets here because they’ll probably get interpreted by the blog, so I’ll replace them with parens. At the top of each file I changed:
(html lang=”en”)
to
(html lang=”en” xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” xml:lang=”en”)
If you could tweak your scripts to regenerate the ePub files with that change, it would save me a lot of manual labor
Oh, also, it would be nice to save the files with extension “.epub” instead of “.zip”. That will prevent the browser from ‘helpfully’ unzipping the archive after downloading it. I had to resort to the command-line utility ‘curl’ to download the files unharmed…
Jens, thanks for that information. I guess this is the iBooks app being more rigorous with standards than some other readers. I’ve successfully used the ebooks on the iPhone with Stanza.
But I’m all about standards, so … I’ll work on upgrading all the ebooks to strict xhtml. I’m doing this anyway, but with 1700+ titles, I was hoping to get away with updating just the older ebooks.
Regarding the .epub extension, yes, I think you are right. It’s time. Probably there are now more people out there with ereaders than there are people who know what zip is. (epub is just a zip archive, but …)
Thanks for the feedback!
I’m having real problems getting any of the epub files to open on my BeBook Mini. When I select the file, the screen flashes, but the file doesn’t open. When I open the files with Calibre and Adobe Digital Editions on my computer, they display fine.
The only file I got to open on my BeBook was “The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes”, which is completely blank by the way (both on the BeBook and on Adobe & Calibre).
Any ideas what I’m doing wrong with the other files? Hopefully you’ll get The Casebook fixed soon, as you’re the only place that seems to have it!