Reference Book Uploads Posting Guidelines

[HarryT]

This post summarises the guidelines for posting to this forum section. If we all follow them, it'll make life a lot easier. If you have any comments or suggestions for changes, please feel free to make them.

1. This forum section is for book uploads only, the only exceptions being contributions to the "Sticky" topics at the start of the forum. Any message thread that is not an upload will be moved elsewhere or deleted, as the moderators deem appropriate. The moderators of this forum section are currently Alex Turcic and myself, HarryT.

2. When you upload, you must use a message subject of the form:

Author_surname, Author_firstname (or initials): Book_title. Version. Posting Date

Eg:

Wells, H.G.: The War of the Worlds. v1. 11 Apr 2007

The reason for this is that the thread title is automatically "parsed" to generate the index of eBooks.

3. Please attach your book to the first message in the thread. If you subsequently revise it, edit the first message and re-attach the revised book there, adding a message to the end of the thread to note that you've done so, and saying what the changes are.

4. If you are considering creating a particular eBook, please check before you start whether or not that book has already been uploaded to MobileRead (this can be done by clicking the "E-Books" link on the blue bar near the top of the screen, selecting the "Browse Latest Uploads" option, then selecting the "Search E-Books" link and entering either the title or the author into the search box). If you find that the book has already been uploaded, you are very welcome to upload a new version provided that it "adds" something different to the version already present - this might be a better layout, a new format, significant proof-reading and correction, proper dashes or "curly quotes", for example. If this is the case, when you upload your new version, please add a link to the earlier version (or simply say who the uploader was), and state in the description of your book how it differs from the earlier version.

5. Please respect copyrights, and don't post (or request) anything that's not in the public domain in at least one of the major public domain book collections - eg "Project Gutenberg" (PG) or "Project Gutenberg Australia" - without the clear advance permission of the copyright holder. Any material that clearly infringes copyright will immediately be deleted. Please notify one of the moderators immediately via private message if you believe that an upload does violate copyright.

6. Uploads here should add some notable "value" to a PG (or whatever) original (for example: nice reformatting, artwork, a TOC, footnotes, etc etc). There's really no point in posting here something which which a poster can get from the original source in two minutes.

Thanks!

[Billi]

Eine Bitte an die deutschen Buchgestaltungsexperten:

Bitte tragt Euer Buch auch in diesen Beitrag ein:

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=31130

damit wir diese Tabelle

https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Free_eBooks-de/de

aktuell halten können. Vielen Dank!

[anacreon]

Dear Harry,
I'm brand new to uploading and in my second, https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=232326, it failed - possibly because it was very big (25 MB) - so I put the link to the Gallica website, but it doesn't appear in the list of new ebooks. Is there a way to upload big files?
Thanks in advance for your reply.

EDIT: I just saw that it needs "added value", which it hasn't (neither has my first upload). I just wanted to alert to what appears to me interesting books in a site that I don't see often mentioned. If there is an appropriate forum, can you move it there, as well as my first upload - or suppress them if you deem fit?

[Jellby]

Please note that this is not a site to re-upload files you find elsewhere. In particular, "rule" 6:

Uploads here should add some notable "value" to a PG (or whatever) original (for example: nice reformatting, artwork, a TOC, footnotes, etc etc). There's really no point in posting here something which which a poster can get from the original source in two minutes.

[anacreon]

Yes I was editing simultaneously. How can I cancel all those messages (including here)?

[HarryT]

I'll delete them.

[Psymon]

I just published my 4-book series of "The Writings of Thoreau" (Henry David Thoreau), but one volume in particular in this series is too big to load up here. Can I just provide a link to a page on my website, where the books are already available, or does the actual epub file have to be included in one's submission/post here?

[HarryT]

The files have to be here, I'm afraid.

[Psymon]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The files have to be here, I'm afraid.

Well, that's understandable. Can I post one book (out of the 4 in the series) and include a link to my site for the rest? I guess my problem is that I have four books in this series, three of which are reasonably small in size (at about 2 megs each), but by far the most important book of the bunch is one volume which is an entire anthology, complete with biographies, analysis & criticism, and TONS of other stuff, literally thousands of pages long, and full of illustrations 'n' stuff -- but that one is too big to upload here (at ~24 megs).

Any suggestions? It'd be nice to share them all here -- especially since I do actually thank the MobileRead Forums in my "Acknowledgements" -- but it would be a shame if I can only share the three less-important books in the series, and not the one that is by far the most important one.

[Billi]

Could you perhaps reasonably divide the fourth volume into two or shrink the size of the illustrations?

[Psymon]

Originally Posted by Billi

Could you perhaps reasonably divide the fourth volume into two or shrink the size of the illustrations?

Well, I suppose I could go back and re-do all my many images and add more compression to them to make them smaller in size, but then I'd be sacrificing image quality JUST so that I could load my book up here. I suppose it might be different if my intention in creating them was only to load them up here, but that's not the case -- and, if anything, as time goes on, I can well imagine that that particular book will only increase in size, if/when I add in more and more pictures (which I can see happening).

Oh, well. I guess I'm just out of luck -- as is everyone else here -- as far as sharing my wonderful, amazing, utterly incredible books here goes.

[Jellby]

As a last resort, "compress" your file with a tool that lets you split it in chunks. No need to modify the book, but a bit less convienient for users, as I did here.

[Psymon]

Originally Posted by Jellby

As a last resort, "compress" your file with a tool that lets you split it in chunks. No need to modify the book, but a bit less convienient for users, as I did here.

Ha ha, I zipped it up and lost a whopping 2 kb off the 23 megs.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by Psymon

Ha ha, I zipped it up and lost a whopping 2 kb off the 23 megs.

Zipping isn't the solution. An ePub is already zipped. The poster was indicating that splitting the file could be useful.

Dale

[Psymon]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

Zipping isn't the solution. An ePub is already zipped. The poster was indicating that splitting the file could be useful.

Yeah, I did catch that Jellby mentioned that (and did that), but isn't that expecting a bit much of others, to not only unzip (or un-rar) the files, and then have the knowledge -- never mind inclination -- to put them together? I mean, WE know how to make ebooks, but if I post these to the "get your free ebooks" forum here, I'm sure there's a lot of readers out there who just enjoy reading ebooks, but haven't the first clue how to put them together if they're "taken apart."

I also thought it was interesting, actually, that Jellby loaded up multiple zip files, each under 20 megs (the limit, apparently), and yet all in the same post adding up to much more than that -- so I can't load up one file if it's more than 20 megs, but I guess I could load up 100 or 1000 (hypothetically) that are less than that, all in the same post.

Why not just raise the limit for ebook uploads? Surely I'm not the only person who (along with Jellby) has wanted to load up a book that's bigger than that (and not because its "designed badly" or something, but simply because of the size of it, or the number of images or whatever)?