Archive for the ‘FreeBooksPlus Commentary’ Category
Oh Oh Oh I’ve done it – or rather I haven’t.
This post was meant to go out a week or so ago but somehow I got it all wrong and didn’t publish properly.
Better late than never – this is the post
I’ll be posting again in a couple of weeks.
Like most families here in Bulgaria we’re off to the seaside.
I’m packing plenty of free books – including some audio books I’ve specially prepared.
What I’ve planned for the next few posts:
Freebies from commercial companies
Reviews
Editing audio files.
Finding free magazines.
Looking at podcasts.
If any of you are off on holiday too, enjoy yourselves.
I’ll report back soon.
So to free audio books.
some people love them and some people loathe them.
I’m going to tell you that right now that I come into the first group.
I love audio books.
Why some people loathe them I’m not quite sure. Perhaps it’s because they don’t like the way they’re read and some people don’t like the abridged versions.
Another problem with commercial audio books is that they’re often very expensive.
However, from my point of view audio books do a great job in certain circumstances, for example on long journeys or when you have a lot of time on your hands, waiting in airports and so on.
For me the most obvious example was last year when I was 10 days in hospital.
Exactly what was wrong with me I’m not absolutely certain. My doctor had ordered some blood tests, I was coughing very badly and she decided to send me to hospital.
Now in common with most countries, here in Bulgaria hospitals have trouble with funding but I can put it on the record that I was quite impressed.
it wasn’t that the food was good, it wasn’t that the ward was bright and newly painted.
It was that the medical staff and the equipment they used were excellent.
The great danger of course was getting bored. My wife and son visited me every day but nevertheless I had hours and hours to spare.
But time passed rather happily as I had with me the complete recordings of the “Diaries of Samuel Pepys” and the “Diary of Adrian Mole”, one factual and one fictional diary which made up a diary phase and I was really able to listen to these works. And lying there on my hospital bed and, later on, when I was allowed to get up and walk around, sitting in my chair, with my mp3 player, it really made my day. So I can only say “Great” to audio books.
So, what about free audio books?
I’ve been astonished in my researches at the enormous variety of resources for free audio books. And, in coming posts I’ll be looking at some of those resources and I’ll be giving tutorials on how I deal with them.
This site is about legal free books.
When it gets to audio books there are copyright issues not only surrounding th text but also the actors, producers and so on.
There are several sources of audio books which are free.
One of the most obvious is the radio.
As this blog is on a computer I’m going to emphasize playing and listening to the radio over the internet.
Exactly what to listen to, and how to listen to it is something for next time.
If you enjoyed this post or found it useful, please think of taking time to comment, bookmark your favourite social sites or subscribe to my feed.
So, let’s get straight in and talk about our next free book. The important think now is to look at free books in the PDF format. Many, many e books are produced like this.
E books are electronic books and the PDF format is ideal.
It’s ideal for many reasons some of which are perhaps not ideal from the readers point of view.
One reason why many Electronic Books are produced in the PDF format is because the author can block the use of a great deal of the content. It can be password protected so that the reader cannot copy the book and cannot print the book. I tend to take the view that too much of this is against the principles of our project here at Free Books Plus.
Another thing I want to emphasise again is the Free Books Plus is only concerned with legal books. I say that because you’ll find many many books on the Internet which are often free as illegal downloads using file sharing schemes and also from sites and parts of the world where copyright is not respected or recognized.
If you download these books you do so at your own risk and also run the risk of download the nasties that pervade the Internet such as viruses and trojans.
As this is our first PDF book, I want to make sure that everything is simple and convenient, so I’m going to give you one of my own stories.
As I’ve mentioned, perhaps, I’ve had a number of careers in my life as a photographer, a writer and an educator. Now my writing career has been somewhat sporadic and I’ve often concentrated more on journalism than literature.
Nevertheless I have published a handful of short stories and poems so I’m going to give you as my first free PDF book the first story I ever published and got paid for.
Karl comes out of my experiences working as an auxiliary psychiatric nurse near Edinburgh. I’ll say straight away as most authors do that it’s a work of fiction. The name Karl I took from a man I greatly admired but had nothing to do with the mental health regime of the time.
So, I think it’s a good idea to provide my first free PDF book as one which I know has no restrictions and which you can copy and print as you like – though not use for any commercial purpose.
You can download it, read it on the screen, print it out or share with your friends as you like.
So here are the procedures for dealing with the story called Karl.
The first thing you have to do is download it. (Always make sure you virus check files downloaded from the Internet)
So click here:
Although PDF files are compact you’ll normally find them provided as Zip files.
I’m hoping that most readers will know what a Zip file is but if you don’t it’s just a file or collection of files which are packaged together and compressed or zipped to make them smaller.
When you’ve downloaded the Zip file you’ll have to unzip it.
If you use Microsoft XP as your operating system you’ll find it easy because it has a built in zip extractor – you simply right click on the file and choose extract all.
If you need a programme to unzip your files there are many available. Many are commercial products but I suggest using 7 – Zip which is a free Open Source product.
Once you’ve downloaded your zip file and unzipped, you’ll then have to read it – and I’ve already given details of some PDF programmes to do the job.
Once you’ve opened your PDF file you can read the story on screen, print it out or send copies to your friends.
I hope you’ll enjoy this free book, I hope you’ll enjoy reading one of my stories.
I’m going to ask some other writers if they have free books available too.
I’m going to sign off now, – it’s a bit boring but I’ll suggest again if you’ve got a moment, subscribe to the feed, comment for everyone to read your views, and bookmark me on your favourite Social Sites.
Till next time …
Now let’s get on with formatting the first Free Book – Tobermory and preparing it for print
Recommended Resources: – on Free Resources Page:
Abiword
EditPad Lite
Textfixer
So you downloaded your text and selected the story called Tobermory and copied and pasted into your word processor or text editor. And all is fine.
Well, there’s nothing exactly wrong but probably your text is formatted with short lines all ending with a carriage return which you might be able to see. Like this:
This, of course is necessary if you want to preserve the lines of text like a poem or a list.
But for a Story like Tobermory I’d rather go a step further and get rid of those carriage returns and have the text properly arranged in in paragraphs.
Now this blog is called freebooksplus so I’m going to recommend free tools. I’ll say right now that if you want to reformat the text on your computer, the easiest way is to use Microsoft Word which will easily replace the carriage returns.
Unfortunately the free word processors have no easy way of doing this.
Still, let’s do it all online:
Select the whole text you want to reformat (control+a) and then cut it (control+x)
Then log onto the cool site at Textfixer.
Paste (control+v) your text into the first box and your text will be miraculously cleaned up and reformatted. Like this:
Now just copy and paste into your word processor and it’s all done.
Choose your font and page format and you’re ready to print. I like to use Arial Narrow font and make the page margins a little narrower than the default.
I also like to add some headers and/or footers.
Then you can print out your story.
Now it’s time to get on with finding free books and deciding what to do with them. I’m going to begin with E-texts from Project Gutenberg which are produced as standard ASCII files. Don’t worry if you don’t know what that means as it should be clear later.
First of all let’s find a book. We all have our favourite authors and one of mine is Saki.
Saki is the pen name or pseudonym of Hector Hugh Munro (1870-1916).
In his relatively short life he was born in Burma, brought up in North Devon by two aunts, returned to Burma to join the military police but left because of ill health. In London he worked as a story writer and journalist before enlisting in the army in 1914 when he was killed in France.
Still he had time to write the short stories which made him famous and one of my favourites is Tobermory.
There’s no point in writing a long review of a short story – if you don’t know it, you’ll have the chance to read it yourself. All I’m telling you now is that Tobermory is an extremely intelligent cat who has the power of speech. He doens’t suffer fools gladly and speaks his mind which makes him a lot of enemies.
To get the text of this story follow the link to the website of Project Gutenburgh a huge repository of E-texts for you to download and read at your leisure and pleasure.
(Legal note – on this site I will never advocate breaking the copyright laws so make sure you always read the terms and conditions carefully before you download anything ),
Tobermory is part of the Collection called “The Chronicles of Clovis”. You can find it by going to the Project Gutenburgh site and typing “Tobermory” in the Title box in Search:
Here’s the link: (click on the picture)
Click GO and you should reach the page for: Etext-No. 3688 “The Chronicles of Clovis” which includes the story “Tobermory”.
Download the text to your computer and then you can read it in your favourite text editor or word processor.
OK that’s all there is to it?
Or is it? You might like to format the text and print it out. We’ll discuss this later in the next part of the tutorial.
Now download the text onto your computer
Hello there! I want to tell you all about free books plus.
Now the reason why I started free books plus is because I love books. And of course, I love free books.
This isn’t just because they’re free but because they help me to do things with books that I normally couldn’t do at all.
Let me give you some examples:
Many years ago I was living in Ibra which is a remote town in Wali Sharqiya in Oman. Now, they simply weren’t any books around, and I was dying for some reading material.
That’s when I connected to the internet and found I was able to download lots of reading matter. In other words, I found lots of free books in a situation where I couldn’t find books any other way.
Here’s another example:
As I said, I love books, and I especially love illustrated books. I have quite a collection of old books, classic novels, fairytales old encyclopaedias and lots of books with pictures by famous illustrators, which are now out of copyright and collectable.
I also love to collect modern books which are beautifully made, or specially illustrated or finely bound.
The problem here is that many of these are too delicate or too precious to read. They look good on the shelf and now and then I take them down and look at the pictures. Sometimes I even copy the pictures and write articles about them, but the idea of reading them frequently makes me quite worried.
And it’s not just me. I have a 10-year-old son. He loves to read. Obviously, I want him to read, I want to encourage him all I can. But when he says to me “Daddy can I read the Red Fairy Book”, which I have in a fine old collectable edition or, Daddy can I read your book by the Brothers Grim”, I have the same problem.
These books are just too precious for my little boy’s hands. Now, there is a solution. The solution is to go onto the Internet and to download the Red Fairy Book or download the stories by the Brothers Grim and print them out.
This is a cheap way of printing the stories, and there are more advantages.
You can choose a font to suit you. You can format the books in a way you like to make sure that they’re easy to read and if you or your children should tear them, spill drinks on them or otherwise destroy them, well it doesn’t cost much and you can print the pieces again.
And this is part of the plus of free books plus.
I’ll provide advice on free software on printers and printing. Or how to use the software you already have so that you can print the books to suit your personal taste.
Now there are other kind of books than classic literature.
I love to get into the wonderful world of E books. E-books, or electronic books cover every subject under the sun, and many of them are free.
You can find books about good health, how to fix your computer how to make money on the internet. How to emigrate to a sunny country, how to buy a house in Bulgaria or Germany or Spain. You can find e-books on every subject.
One problem with e-books is how do you read them?
You can read them on the computer screen.
Some people and companies like Amazon are trying to introduce electronic book readers but quite frankly, I prefer to read my books on paper so once again I can give advice on how to print cheaply and clearly so that you can have the books you want on the page and stored on your computer exactly as you like.
You can see from this approach that you need a computer. You need an Internet connection and you need software
So part of my intention on freebooksplus is to give advice on how to use your computer safely, how to print your books clearly and how to do it as cheaply as possible.
Free has a number of meanings.
It can mean free as is in no cost, it can mean free as in out of prison. It can mean free, as is available to everybody and my idea in freebooksplus is to use the word free in a lot of its meanings at the moment.
So far I’ve emphasised the written word.
Another way I love to have my books is as recordings that I can listen to.
I was surprised when I researched this area to find that there are many free books available. Free books of the highest quality and with a very wide range of contents.
So I plan to tell you how to obtain free audio books, how to listen to them, how to reformat them for convenient listening.
And once again, discussing the free software and resources to do the job.
One last point about free books, is that many commercial companies provide free resources.
Where I find that there are free books, free software, free advice from commercial companies. I shall tell you about this too.
One last point for the moment. As I said, I love books. I love reading books. I love listening to books. I love talking about books. I love books about facts, and I love books about fiction.
So when I give my examples I’ll discuss some of the books that I have found and read and review some of my favourite books and use them as examples of how to enjoy the wonderful world of free books.
I hope you’ll follow my blog, and over the coming weeks and months and years join with me. In searching for discussing and enjoying free books,
