Baen Books - Honor Harington 1 & 2

[TheMooch]

I'm already reading book 8 of the series, but decided to play with BookDesigner and see if I could make a nicer version of my initial hack and slash rtf conversion.

Here's the result of playing around for a little while and getting the settings right where I wanted them. I'm considering finding larger (and better) copies of the artwork for the front page, but overall I like the way these came out.

Gimme some feedback on them. I'm going to convert the rest of the Harrington Series, but dunno when I'm gonna be able to get to it.


**newer version. I added a little extra artwork to both.

[Robert Marquard]

The Honor Harrington books are copyrighted. You need to ask Baen first if you are allowed to convert and publish the result.

[TheMooch]

True. "Free Library" and "We'll sue you for distributing for what we already give away for free" tend to mean the same thing these days.

Seems kind of stupid, but that's the nature of copyright laws these days.

Just in case I'll remove the files though.

[Robert Marquard]

You are looking at it the wrong way. Baen has the copyright so they decide how it is published. This is what "copy right" means after all. That they choose to hand out the ebooks free of charge does not diminish their rights.
I did not mention legal action from Baen at all. I only showed you the proper way of handling it. Ask Baen. I see good chances that Baen adds the format to their set of formats as long as it does not need any DRM. Yet it is their decision not yours.

[TheMooch]

In addition, I'm waiting on permission back from Baen.

[Hadrien]

I'll contact Baen too, could be pretty cool to have them on Feedbooks, this way their content will be available for both Sony/iLiad users.

[Bob Russell]

Nicely handled guys! We definitely want to respect copyrights here, but if permission is granted, these would be really nice documents to have in Reader format.

[scotty1024]

Given the choice of a Baen RTF which is re-sizable and currently has much sharper text on the Sony Reader than a PDF which is both non-re-sizable and suffers from moth eaten glyphs on the Sony, why would I want to download a PDF'd Bean free book from Feedbooks than a RTF from Baen?

Even in the future an LRF file will provide more readability features than a PDF on the Sony. I would submit that Feedbooks really needs to upgrade their technology support for the Sony to embrace the LRF format if they want to say they truly support the Sony Reader.

[VillageReader]

Some of the Baen books (can't recall offhand which ones) have maps & other glyphs buried after the cover page. Manybooks normally doesn't include these - at least they don't when they convert .html works from Gutenberg. I don't know about feedbooks. When I have done my own conversions (for my own use) of Baen .rft to .pdf, I usually resize the glyphs to be a full page before the conversion.

[HarryT]

Well done for handling this the right way! As has been said, the fact that the HH books can be freely given away does not alter the fact that they are in copyright, and creating a "derivative work" (eg a conversion to LRF format) does require the permission of the copyright holder.

[Leaping Gnome]

Some people love margins Scotty.

[Hadrien]

Originally Posted by scotty1024

Given the choice of a Baen RTF which is re-sizable and currently has much sharper text on the Sony Reader than a PDF which is both non-re-sizable and suffers from moth eaten glyphs on the Sony, why would I want to download a PDF'd Bean free book from Feedbooks than a RTF from Baen?

Even in the future an LRF file will provide more readability features than a PDF on the Sony. I would submit that Feedbooks really needs to upgrade their technology support for the Sony to embrace the LRF format if they want to say they truly support the Sony Reader.

There's a few reasons to prefer PDF over RTF:
- embedded fonts (multilanguage support)
- links (TOC)
- images
- real footnotes, nice chapter headings and footers
- better flowing of the text (less ugly blank spaces, hyphenation)
- margins in RTF/LRF are usually too big, looks ugly

Currently there's 2 bad points with PDF files when they're generated for the right device:
- you can't change the size of the font on the reader itself (but you can generate a book with the right font size)
- the Sony Reader doesn't hande PDF as well as the iLiad, a font like Adobe Times that is easy on the eyes on the iLiad, isn't on the PRS-500. But some fonts are OK on the Sony Reader too.

As for LRF support: right now the main focus on Feedbooks is still the beta, with many features that are being added, bugs fixed etc... You sound as if Feedbooks had been around for years without any new features. That's not the case, the website itself is still in beta with many features in development mostly for the News section, and new stuff added every week.

We won't be working on any new format during the beta, but as soon as the features are ready, and bugs fixed, we'll start studying which format would be the most interesting to add. Right now PDF is the best format we could start the beta with: it's supported by most of the big names in the e-ink bizness, there's a lot of powerful tools to generate PDF files out there (pdflatex is one of those), and even though you can't really reflow PDF files yet, it provides much more advanced formatting than any other format. In the future, I see two other XML based formats that looks promising: mostly Mobipocket, and LRF if Sony releases the PRS-500 or a similar device for a much larger market. The goal for Feedbooks is not to provide a bunch of e-text available in dozens of formats: that's what manybooks provides. But manybooks lack real formatting, and I wouldn't read any e-book without some sort of formatting myself. What Feedbooks provide for public domain books is a real formatting, and the ability to customize this formatting on the fly. Converting from one format to another without any formatting is easy, you just pass the whole text through some basic tool and you get your text in another format. More complex formatting takes some time, and we intend to provide good formatting for all the supported formats in the future (oh and we already tested audio books too with text-to-speech).

[Robert Marquard]

No PDF from Baen! They hate it as much as i do. PDF is not an ebook format.
If Baen will support LRF is probably simply a question of how many ebooks in that format can they sell. If not enough i doubt that they will support the format. Not even for the Free Library. It exists for a purpose and that is selling e/books.

If the direct conversion is denied then ask if you can hand out readymade conversion projects where the enduser has to get the ebook from other sources. That should be legal enough without permission, but with permission is better.
Be warned IANAL!

[NatCh]

Originally Posted by Hadrien

- margins in RTF/LRF are usually too big, looks ugly

Not to argue, just a point of clarification -- the margins are adjustable, I don't think it recognizes margin settings at all in RTFs (so it doesn't show any -- doesn't on my RTFs at least ) and 5 mm margin in the LRFs I make with BookDesigner.

BTW, I've been putting my Baen books into LRF (from the RTF option) with BD. Once you get the settings the way you want them BD is so easy to use, it's not even funny. I'm under the impression that they provide the RTF option expressly so that users can convert to their preferred format, if it's not one of their "standard" ones, so I don't think they'd object to our converting the books to LRF. I do think they'd prefer we didn't distribute them ourselves, although they've shown a remarkable restraint in that regard for folks who are distributing their CDs in whole.

[Hadrien]

Originally Posted by NatCh

Not to argue, just a point of clarification -- the margins are adjustable, I don't think it recognizes margin settings at all in RTFs (so it doesn't show any -- doesn't on my RTFs at least ) and 5 mm margin in the LRFs I make with BookDesigner.

BTW, I've been putting my Baen books into LRF (from the RTF option) with BD. Once you get the settings the way you want them BD is so easy to use, it's not even funny. I'm under the impression that they provide the RTF option expressly so that users can convert to their preferred format, if it's not one of their "standard" ones, so I don't think they'd object to our converting the books to LRF. I do think they'd prefer we didn't distribute them ourselves, although they've shown a remarkable restraint in that regard for folks who are distributing their CDs in whole.

Yes, same problem with images and hyperlinks. Some of the features of RTF are not supported on the reader, with these features on, RTF would be a much better format for the PRS-500.

BD is a really cool software, but the main problem is that some users won't go through the process of creating e-books themselves, and I can really understand why. In order for e-books to be successful, we need to provide some kind of automatic formatting for e-books.