This is quite a thrill — there’s a paragraph about this site on page 74 of Mark Frauenfelder’s engrossing Rule the Web: How to Do Anything and Everything on the Internet—Better, Faster, Easier!
I obviously like digital books; still, there’s something about a physical book that can really hit the spot.
The cover art for The Diary of a U-boat Commander, while fun to draw, was completely inaccurate; I’ll admit to not having read the book before making the cover, and what a mistake! The story is set in 1918, long before the Nazi party’s rise to power, so the flag in the background is ridiculous.
I’m going to remove the custom artwork for now (at least until I’ve read the book).
Something is messed up, and I’m having trouble tracking down the issue; the symptoms are:
All of this is complicated by the difficulty I’ve had in tracking down information on how Installer.app works, the various permissions issues on the iPhone (/var/root/Media vs. /var/mobile/Media is a bit of a headache), and Installer’s recent updates.
iPodTouchFan’s page on Creating a Source Repository for use with Installer.app has been very helpful.
Another useful resource is iPhoneAtlas’ Installer.app troubleshooting page.
Reworking the Books.app creation script to remove extraneous Path information from each book’s zip file has taken care of some of the issues.
But there are still far too many folks having trouble with this, so it’s going to be disabled until it’s sorted out. Sorry folks!
The iPhone reading space just got a little bigger with the addition of textReader, a simple and straightforward way to read plain text and Palm doc formatted ebooks [Update - mobipocket, plucker, and other formats too!]. One of the nicest features is the ability to download a file via URL, so I’ve added a link for each book to manybooks.net/m/ — if you’re browsing the site with an iPhone you’ll be shown a URL like http://mnybks.net/pdb/4701 which you can use in textReader to pull that book directly to your phone!
The numeric code at the end of the URL is the same as the “mnybks.net ID” shown on each title’s page on manybooks.net.
See iPhone help for more specific instructions.
It’s very basic right now: create a user account and add titles to “bookshelves”; keep track of books you’ve read or intend to read.
Bookshelves can also be used to transfer books to an iPhone using “Installer.app” (see the iPhone help section for details).
Future features may include public access to your shelves, bulk downloading, and more. If you’ve got suggestions, please share them with me!