Manybooks.net Site News

There’s a new format available for iPhone users that have installed Books.app — it’s really just a folder full of 20k HTML files, but it looks good and seems to work pretty well.

An excellent site for displaying ebooks on the iPhone has launched: scrollbox.org - with the entire Project Gutenberg library ready-to-go.

The site also has a couple of really great features:

• You can create a personal library of titles
• It saves your place in each book
• You can upload your own texts!

The source code for the site is also available, via svn (I’m going to learn a few things, that’s for sure).

Read more about scrollbox on their about page.

Can I just grouse for a minute?

The following javascript will scroll the window contents by one screen’s height:

onClick=”window.scrollBy(0,window.innerHeight?window.innerHeight:document.body.clientHeight);”

But it doesn’t work on iPhone. Argh.

onClick=”window.scrollBy(0,170);”

That scrolls a Safari 3.0 beta window 170 pixels. But it doesn’t work on iPhone’s mobileSafari browser.

onClick=”window.scrollBy(0,window.innerHeight);”

That works on Safari 3.0 beta, too — but it jumps all the way to the bottom of the window on the iPhone. It seems like something’s broken, or not implemented fully, in the iPhone’s browser.

Or so it seems; I’m totally new to javascript, and this is just what I’ve been able to pull from other folks examples and developer.mozilla.org javascript documentation. Maybe it’s me?

This is heartening news for iPhone users - a standalone application for reading text and HTML files on your iPhone. Since third-party applications aren’t supported by Apple (yet), it still requires some hacking to get it installed, but the documentation makes this look pretty promising.

From the sourceforge Books.app homepage:

Books.app is a simple eBook reader for the iPhone. It reads HTML and text files stored in your Media/EBooks folder, and is smart enough to enter subdirectories, if, for instance, you’ve broken a book down by chapters.

I can hardly wait :)

A podcast audiobook of Norbert Davis’ The Mouse in the Mountain is now available on our audiobook blog. Each day for the next two weeks a chapter will be released, with excellent text-to-speech provided by the RSS conversion service at talkr.com .