Manybooks.net Site News

OK, a kind visitor named Julius was tenacious enough to try several JAR ebooks — all of which failed with the same “INVALID FILE” error (great error, eh?).

Lots of messing about later I realized that the MANIFEST.MF file that must be created with each ebook has got an extra tab character at the beginning of each line; I had been a little overzealous when formatting my PHP scripts… Anyway, the JAR files seem to work OK again. I think. I’ll have to check with Julius :)

It seems that some the JAR files on mnybks.net were only half-made, leaving the download as an “INVALID FILE” — and while I haven’t found the cause of it, the problem may have been fixed a while ago, so I’m re-building all of the JAR files.

All of the tests of re-built files have been OK, so let’s hope that’s the end of it, eh?

A visitor named Theresa suggested that the ability to search or sort by word count would be very helpful to her — while that isn’t possible yet, I have added a word count display for every title.

Another visitor wanted to know how many pages were in each book, which is a very difficult problem considering the many different formats, screen sizes, fonts, etc etc — even figuring out the file size for each format was going to become un-wieldy! Up to this point I’ve displayed the (rough) page count next to the “Read Online” link, but it was simply linked to the size of the interim HTML page that’s created for each title. A decent way to compare titles, but not terribly obvious to most folks.

So, now there’s a word count performed on each title. It’s being done dynamically at this point, though I expect I’ll figure out a way to store it…