Manybooks.net Site News

On Saturday, right before I left on vacation, there was a small power outage — about 1 second when all the lights in the house flickered — and I had to restart my DSL modem and router to regain net access. That fixed it just long enough for me to get on a plane and forget about it. It seems it happened again sometime later that day, but my neighbor Michael Dain was kind enough to reset both devices while simultaneously feeding the cats today. Thanks Michael!

So the good news is that the site wasn’t forced to shutter due to some DMCA violation, but simply a small glitch. My brother has suggested that I get a UPS for the modem, router, and server, and that sounds like a good idea.

I’ve been watching the news on the iRex iLiad — announcements, specifications, rumors, etc etc. and now that it’s actually available for sale (in a limited, almost finished kind of way) I’m anxious to begin figuring out how to format texts for it. Accordingly, “iRex iLiad” is now a download option — if you happen to try it out, please let me know what you think of it! How is the font size? pagination? margins? how do the cover images look?

Update: Poking around on iRex’s website I noticed How to Make Content for your iLiad a PDF with basic instructions. The recommended document size for PDFs was 148mm x 210mm, with 5mm margins. They also had examples of 14, 11, and 8pt Arial. Times is also built in. I switched the iRex iLiad PDF format on manybooks to those specs, using 11pt Arial as the body copy. Looks pretty readable to me — I wonder if it seems small on an actual device?

The first chapter from This World is Taboo by Murray Leinster has been posted, and a podcast RSS feed is available from Talkr.com.

From the back cover:

Land on Dara? One might as well commit suicide! Untouchable, like the Darans — that’s what they’d call Calhoun if he broke the quarantine. And they’d wipe him out on sight. But Dara needed him and that was the kind of challenge this Interstellar Med Serviceman would never dodge.

A visitor named Chris was kind enough to point out that the latest books added to the site weren’t available as iSilo documents — it seems that format hasn’t worked since the move was made to the new Mac Mini server. Dang!

Well, the old iSilo386 program that created plain iSilo format was only available as a pre-compiled binary for x86 Linux, which rules out running it on the intel Mini — but there’s iSiloXC, a command-line converter! It’s the PowerPC version, but seems to work alright somehow, so iSilo format is back. This format allows the inclusion of images, so the covers are embedded at a maximum pixel width of 280px — let me know if you have any trouble with images that size!

On a side note, perhaps I should just call the format iSilo? When there were two iSilo formats available it made sense — one worked with older iSilo readers, and iSiloX worked with readers version 3 and up… but the older reader software probably isn’t in use anymore… so I guess I just change it to plain iSilo in a bit.

Titles that belong to a series of books are now listed as such, and can be browsed via the Series list.

New series will be identified and populated over the next few weeks, but I’ll start with well known onces like the Tarzan series, the Bobbsey Twins, etc.