Posts Tagged ‘free books’
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.
OK, so now you’ve downloaded and configured audiograbber, how are we going to actually record our audiobook from the Radio.
Well, there’s an immediate easy way and the scheduled way.
The easy way is to wait until the programme you want to record starts and then hit the Record button on Real Player or Audio Grabber.
Real Player will tell you if recording is permitted. As I only recommend legal methods of obtaining recordings I’ll concentrate on Radio where recording is allowed.
The scheduled way is more sophisticated. It means you can go out to dinner, go to bed, and when you get back your recording is all ready on your computer in the mp3 format.
Here’s how.
You need to choose your programme.
For the purposes of this tutorial I’ve chosen today’s broadcast of one of my favourite books, Gilbert White’s the “Natural History of Selbourne” on Spoken Word Internet Radio Station. If you’ve forgotten it’s (http://www.audiobookradio.net/index.php).
Go to Programme Schedule and the broadcast is scheduled for 3.39pm / am.
Obviously you can just leave the radio streaming until you’re ready to record but a better way might be to schedule when you want the broadcast to start. If you’ve forgotten how to do this, or haven’t read the Post Tutorial, you can find it here: (Let’s Schedule “The Dead Hand” by Wilkie Collins)
My tip is to set the start time a little earlier than scheduled.
Next, it’s time to open up Audiograbber and set the timer to record the programme when it’s broadcast:
Make sure it’s in Line In Sampling mode and play a sound file to make sure the Mixer is used for recording as discussed last Post – i.e. checking that the record level is working.
AudioGrabber is easy to set up. If your recording is on the same day, just write the day in where it says date. For time use the same system as your computer clock – in my case 17:35:00 and the length is in hours and minutes.
If you get stuck, Audiograbber has excellent help files.
Now you’re ready to go away and leave your computer to make the recording.
You can ask Audiograbber to shut down the computer when it’s finished.
This doesn’t always seem to work for me so we’ll check some other shut down programmes in another post.
For the moment you might like to download these two programmes for the final clean up.
MP3 Cut
and
Vista Shutdown Timer
Details on the Free Resources Page.
Ok so you’ve grabbed Audiograbber and you’ve downloaded the LAME files – especially the dll. So it’s time to set things up.
Open Audiograbber and you’ll get a screen like this:
Before we can use it, we have to decide on a few options using the Settings tab.
First of all, in General Settings decide where to save the new recordings? You can choose any directory you like but I like to have a directory only for my recordings.
The next step is to make sure we can record directly to the mp3 format.
Because MP3 files are so widespread many people assume that it’s a free standard. It isn’t, so we must find a free decoder. The standard is LAME. The name in fact means LAME Ain’t an Mp3 Encoder!
Anyway, you must download LAME and make sure the relevant files are loaded into the same directory as your Audiograbber installation. Here’s how it is on my computer.
The next stage is to set your MP3 settings:
There are lots of views on this but I prefer high quality rather than the smallest file so I use variable bitrate settings. Here’s how my settings look.
Now we’re almost ready to make our first recording.
choose line in sampling from the File menu.
You should get this without the green volume bar.
Check the volume meter. No volume, no recording. It’s as simple as that.
Here’s where things get a little bit tricky because operating systems and setups vary a bit.
Play something on your computer, music, voice, anything.
If the volume meter shows up and gets shorter and longer, you’re in luck.
If not, you must make sure that your recording system is set to mixer, not line in or microphone.
Try clicking the mixer button – you might be in luck.
If you’re like me you’ll have to go to the audio manager. My computer uses the popular Realtek manager and it’s in the Control Panel reached through the start menu.
When you’re in the control panel, find the sound effect icon
Then make sure the stereo mix control is highlighted.
Now everything is ready for recording.
Audiograbber will, indeed, grab any sound on the computer and you can see that you can record manually just by setting the time in minutes and pressing the record button or you can choose time scheduled.
Next post we’ll make the actual recording.
Footnote:
Audiograbber is a Windows only programme. Users of other operating systems my like to try Audacity the current, stable version doesn’t include a timer facility but the new Beta version does. I’ll look at it closer later.
I got this information from this post at RichardCravey.com thanks
My son loves to listen to the radio.
He has a radio cassette recorder in his room and when he wants to record something that he hears, he simply presses the button and the recording is made on the tape cassette.
In my living room I have a rather more sophisticated DVD hard disc recorder so that I can record television shows for the purpose of timeshifting. That is, so I can watch a film which is shown at two o’clock in the morning at a time convenient for me.
So it all seems very easy.
Unfortunately, when it comes to recording from the Internet, the situation is not so simple.
The broadcasters and producers of music and speech and the consumers have managed to get themselves into a great big mess.
Producers and consumers have simply not managed to come to an agreement concerning copying digital material which they both accept as fair and legal.
Now when it comes to copying from the internet so that we can listen at our own convenience, the situation is quite complicated.
There are two main considerations:
One is the technical one.
How do we actually record from the Internet Radio?
There are many software programs available, which you can buy and some of them even have names like BBC radio recorder.
Now, I’m going to tell you again that this site, Free Books Plus is based on legal and legitimate free audio and print books, so I don’t want to get into any grey areas.
My proposal is to first of all discuss the technical means of copying from the Internet Radio using free software and then secondly, to have a look at how we can copy from an Internet radio station, when it legal.
If you play a radio station in RealPlayer and the record button is active, it means that this radio station has not tried to block the recording system.
Now, in order to make your recordings from the Internet Radio, I’m going to advise downloading two pieces of free software.
The first one is a program called audiograbber.
In order to make audiograbber work correctly to produce the MP3 files that you probably want, you will then have to download another piece of software called LAME.
Here are the internet addresses which are also available on the resources page.
http://www.free-codecs.com/download/Audiograbber.htm
http://www.free-codecs.com/download/Lame_Encoder.htm
In the next post there’ll be more advice on how to use these pieces of software, and eventually how to make your recordings.
Blogging is a human activity, and so there are bound to be delays.
Even so I never expected a combination of tooth infection with so many visits to the dentist, land clearing, which I had planned and, shame of it, actually deleting one of my blogs by accident which caused me so many delays.
It’s not something you really think much about when you start blogging. So it’s live and learn.
Anyway, without going on about this too much, lets get on with the next part of the post to see how we can listen to free books on the radio and then schedule our listening to give us more control.
And for this part I’m going to leave the BBC and have a look at a relatively new service called Audio Book Radio.
This service, plays books and stories and also provides an opportunity to buy commercial recordings.
Obviously the emphasis in Free Books Plus will be on listening to the free radio broadcasts
The first thing we have to do is to find the station, which broadcasts from this address.
http://www.audiobookradio.net/index.php
Here you’ll find information and a programme guide.
Let’s have a look at how to play this radio station and then later on, perhaps to scheduling it to play when we want it to.
Audio Book Radio gives you a choice of many different players.
You probably know by now that the question of media players is really quite a controversial one.
Many of the well-known players have a number of problems and are controlled by commercial interests.
I’m not going to go into that here.
I’m going to stay with Real Player simply because it’s the player we’ve been using before
The first thing to do is to right click your mouse on to Real Player and then choose Save Link As.
I’m using the Firefox browser. Your browser may be slightly different.
To make things easier, I’m going to change the link name to something like audiobook radio, and then save the the link to the desktop.
If we do this, it means that any time we click on this link Real Player will open up and play the radio programme of Audiobook Radio.
If you look at the Programme Scedule you’ll see the times the stories are broadcast – which you will have to adjust to your local time of course.
For my purposes I’ve chosen the story The Dead Hand by Wilkie Collins.
In the next post we’ll look at how to schedule Audio Book radio to start playing on our computer at the correct time.
There are many schedulers available but I’m going to illustrate the use of the free programme Solway’s Task Scheduler – details on the resources page
So, make sure you’ve got your scheduler ready
Until next time ….
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.
In my last post we had a look at how to deal with text files, probably the most basic types of files, with the story “Tobermory” downloaded from the Gutenberg site.
At the end I referred to the PDF file and many, many ebooks or electronic books created sometimes for commercial purposes or informational purposes are provided as PDF files.
PDF simply means Portable Document Format and it was created by the company Adobe – most famous for the Photoshop programme.
The resulting files are small and can combine text and graphics in a convenient format.
Many sites will tell you to read them using the Adobe Acrobat Reader.
First of all I want to be quite clear that this site Freebooks Plus is about promoting free online books, free off line books and free audio books. It’s not about attacking commercial companies.
Many commercial companies such as Adobe provide free resources of excellent quality.
My difficulty with the Adobe Acrobat reader is that it’s a very large download, it gets updated frequently with even more features that are not always useful for our purposes and there’s some danger of it taking over your browser and your PDF files unless your careful with it.
But by all means if you want to get a completely free and totally reliable PDF reader, Adobe’s Acrobat Reader is perfectly good.
However readers of Freebooks Plus might like to consider other options.
You might like to support the Open Source Software movement, or perhaps just want to have much smaller downloads which use fewer resources.
So, if you go to my resource page you can see a list of several alternative PDF readers.
One of the most important points from where I am is if there is a portable version. By portable here I mean, a version of the software that can be carried around on a pen drive often called a memory stick or a USB flash drive.
The reason for this is that if you travel a lot you can take most of your software with you. You can plug into the USB port of any computer in the world and you can quickly use you programmes without leaving any files or information on the host computer.
Pen drives and alternatives such as flash memory cards are getting larger in capacity but it still makes sense to have the smallest programmes available, both to download and to store.
I suggest going to the resources page and trying out the different PDF readers to see which one suits you best.
One more point perhaps is that all these readers do a good job of reading PDF files but not all give you any option for writing onto PDF files.
This is not strictly necessary for reading freebooks but it might be a factor for you.
From the portability point of view I favour the Sumatra and Foxit readers as they are small and seem stable.
The Sumatra Reader is an Open Source product which means that it isn’t a cut down version of a commercial product and it should work across several operating systems.
So let’s choose a PDF reader and then get ready to obtain, prepare and print a free book in the PDF format.
One final point, this blog is all about legal free books.
I can’t stress that enough.
Some PDF book creators may have decided to block facilities such as copying the contents or printing it.
I suggest we respect the authors rights and concentrate on freebooks that don’t have too many restrictions.
If you found this post interesting please don’t be shy about leaving your comments.
I want to share information on freebooks with as many people as possible.
And
If you’ve got a minute, please bookmark me onto your favourites site using the Icons below.
Until 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,
