Friday, February 15, 2008
Free eBooks from Tor
Posted by Ed Hansberry in "CONTENT" @ 05:00 AM
http://www.tor.com/
If you go to Tor's new site, you can sign up to receive a free ebook each week until they get it fully up and running, at which point I suspect they will switch to a pay model. Not a bad promotion. :-) This week's book is book is Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson.
Here is the problem. It comes in PDF format, and seems to be pretty much unlocked. From Adobe Reader 8, I can copy the entire file to the clipboard and past it into Word, but all of the line breaks are gone, and there is a hard return after each line so it won't reflow paragraphs. My Kaiser has Adobe Reader 2.0 LE on it, but it won't reflow the original PDF file, and the screen is to small to zoom in and read without zooming so much, you need to scroll horizontally. I checked on Adobe's site and they haven't updated their download version of Adobe Reader for the PPC in years and am wary of installing it with the ActiveSync converter in Vista's WMDC so it will reflow. Plus, I recall reading some material in that PPC version and even with the reflow, things like illustrations, tables, poetry or maps were either trashed or unusable. I thought about using Repligo to convert the data, but it appears they have totally abandoned the Windows Mobile market. :(
So while this may be a good promotion for people that like to read ebooks on their PC, unless someone has an idea how to get this on your device in a usable format, it may not be a great offer for those of us that would rather read on our phones. Anyone have any ideas?
If you go to Tor's new site, you can sign up to receive a free ebook each week until they get it fully up and running, at which point I suspect they will switch to a pay model. Not a bad promotion. :-) This week's book is book is Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson.
Here is the problem. It comes in PDF format, and seems to be pretty much unlocked. From Adobe Reader 8, I can copy the entire file to the clipboard and past it into Word, but all of the line breaks are gone, and there is a hard return after each line so it won't reflow paragraphs. My Kaiser has Adobe Reader 2.0 LE on it, but it won't reflow the original PDF file, and the screen is to small to zoom in and read without zooming so much, you need to scroll horizontally. I checked on Adobe's site and they haven't updated their download version of Adobe Reader for the PPC in years and am wary of installing it with the ActiveSync converter in Vista's WMDC so it will reflow. Plus, I recall reading some material in that PPC version and even with the reflow, things like illustrations, tables, poetry or maps were either trashed or unusable. I thought about using Repligo to convert the data, but it appears they have totally abandoned the Windows Mobile market. :(
So while this may be a good promotion for people that like to read ebooks on their PC, unless someone has an idea how to get this on your device in a usable format, it may not be a great offer for those of us that would rather read on our phones. Anyone have any ideas?
