Manybooks.net Site News

Cover images (when available) and a linked table of contents are now created for each Mobipocket document whenever possible. Most files have cover images, but not all files have the right kind of chapter headers — it’s a long, boring story, but not every file that’s added to manybooks.net’s collection has chapter headings that can be automatically parsed.

I think my original tests used a file without the right kind of chapter headers or something…

At any rate, if you find mobipocket files with problems please let me know!

Added the option of an anchored T.O.C. to the Custom HTML download — the script will try to build a Table of Contents based on the HTML file’s header tags, and add it to the beginning of the document. I’ll look into adding that for other formats, too.

update: I’ve added a table of contents to the HTML file used to create Mobipocket titles. Anyone care to try that out? — never mind, it doesn’t look like mobigen.exe supports hyperlinks within mobipocket documents :(

On the bright side, it looks like TOC links work in PDFs, so the regular and iPhone-sized PDFs will have Chapter links whenever possible.

Well, it was worth a shot — you can embed an entire page into a bookmark using a base64 encoded data URI. That’s cool, because then you don’t need to use the internet to go grab the page contents (it’s in the bookmark itself!) even if a few things don’t work (like in-page anchors).

You can see an example here: The Lodger bookmarklet. Or you can select “iPhone Bookmarklet” from the Download menu on any title detail page.

The lack of anchors makes most pages pretty unwieldy though, since you can’t save your place within a large HTML document and you can’t jump to a particular chapter. The bookmarklet also takes up about 33% more memory than the plain HTML, too, thanks to base64 encoding.

Perhaps I’ll look into creating a link that doesn’t use the base64 encoding, but I’ve had enough fun for one day. Go ahead and try the “iPhone Bookmarklet” option and send your suggestions to me!

Crazy busy day at work, including the fun of showing the iPhone around to all my co-workers (the varied reactions were amazing!). But I found some time to add “iPhone View” in place of the Download menu for anyone viewing a title with an iPhone — it’ll display the first 6k of a book, with links to the next 6k and a form for entering an arbitrary page (so you could jump to page 20 or whatever). Not elegant, not polished, but it’ll let you do some reading, 6k at a time, and you can save your place with a bookmark.

Suggestions and feedback are welcome, as always.