Spontaneous Derivation

From Boing Boing:

Kelly Link just released her second book, Magic for Beginners, online for a year under the Creative Commons license. 2 of the 9 stories aren’t included due to contractual agreements but this is huge news because two giant companies, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (who published it in paperback) and HarperPerennial (who published the UK edition) have agreed to take a chance and be a part of the CC movement.

You can find PDF, RTF, HTML, and TXT formats on Small Beer Press’s official page.

I created a version from the HTML for my hungry Kindle, and now it can also be devoured by your Kindle or other Mobipocket-compatible reader:

For some reason, even though I’m really, really zombied-out¹ I rather like “Some Zombie Contingency Plans.”

1. and pirated-, and werewolf-ed, and vampired-out, and it’d have to be a really good story to not make me twitch anymore if you involve any of these [↩]

A long time ago (in Internet time, anyways), Scifi.com had a section called Scifiction, where they published science fiction stories online—both “classics”, from writers hoary with age (well… maybe not that hoary; Robert Silverberg, Avram Davidson, Barry N. Malzberg, etc), and “originals”, from newer writers (you know, like Elizabeth Bear, Lucius Shepard, M. Rickert, etc).

Then, for whatever reason, Scifi killed Scifiction. All links to the stories were evaporated.

But the Scifiction archives live on. Horribly slow, badly formatted, aging and uncared for, and nearly unreadable in mobile readers like the Kindle, but still there. (Of course, I’m inserting extra drama here. Cue timpanis.)

I got tired of this, so I created eBooks of them, one per year. This was actually my second serious endeavor in the world of eBooks. It was amusing, because the archives are huge; some 325+ stories reside there, spread out over five years. I can’t distribute them, of course, because the stories are all under copyright—and tracking down over 50 writers, some dead so I’d have to contact their estate, is not something I’m about to do. Nor would they wish me to, I think. So I don’t distribute them, and never will.

But the knowledge of how to do it, for people who wish to make personal eBooks, is distributable.

So here’s a description of how I did it, after the cut. It’s not complete in every detail, because some of the process was manual—there are multiple pitfalls in how the archives work, a lot of it because the archives are spread out over five years, and templates and presentation change enough to cause unwary scripts to die with gurgles halfway through the work. And even so, you end up needing to massage things by hand anyways.

Note: this is quite a bit of effort, but it was still less effort than doing it all by hand. I’m rather proud of this. And, of course, it’s a very tl;dr, mid-level technical discussion. I think it’s mostly a geeky thing.

Continue reading “eBookifying the Scifiction Archives”

Photography: Scurzuzu

Most days I’m filled with desire to import content for my Kindle. Sometimes I think about sharing it with the world, but most times I can’t. It’s the nature of copyright, you see.

I’m not talking about digitizing my library via painfully slow methods (though I am contemplating that); that’s stuff I very obviously can’t share. What I am talking about is text that’s available on the web, but covered by copyright. Despite the fact that it’s up there for all to see without logging in, legally speaking you aren’t allowed to create eBooks and distribute them unless you have permission from the copyright owner. Certain Creative Commons licenses don’t allow this either—if “no derivative work” is allowed, nothing can be done about it; creating an eBook counts as a derivative work. And, given that all content is copyright-protected unless stated otherwise, this is something of a barrier to the would-be eBook creator.

I’m not going to argue against the state of the world, however. People own their content, and they should be able to choose the distribution of that content themselves. Anything else is disrespecting that ownership, and the effort that went into creating it. If someone doesn’t want their stuff as an eBook, even though it’s on the web, that’s their perogative. “It makes no sense!” you may cry. Well, it makes sense if they want to pull that content eventually and sell it—and yes, the Internet Archive respects robots.txt. That their work lives on in your browser cache doesn’t mean it lives on everybody else’s.

So. Now that that’s cleared out of the way.

At the moment, I can easily create eBooks from web content. I have scripts tailored for particular websites that strip away extraneous HTML, educate quotes and other punctuation, create clickable tables of content, aggregate even hundreds of entries into a single collection. There are more problems with efficiently digesting PDFs, but I already have scripts that will take care of the hard page breaks you find while converting a PDF document.

It’s perfectly legal for me to create eBooks for myself and my Kindle. It’s not legal to distribute them, in that form, for everybody else. This frustrates me, but all the same, I do respect the whys behind the restrictions.

The knowledge of how to do make eBooks from this content, though—that can be distributed. And it already has been on the web to some extent.

It’s a difficult business—almost every particular story needs its own care with certain aspects, even stories hosted on the same site; not only do you have non-standard HTML and, in some cases, extremely broken HTML to deal with, you also have specific formatting to deal with, and any of these can be inconsistent through the text. You have text that’s split onto different pages; you may have 300+ entries to deal with, with slightly different formatting constraints applied over five years. There’s no one-size-fits-all to chomp every HTML page into decent eBooks of quality—though there are scripts that will let you do it easily at bad quality.

I’m on the good quality side, obviously. Some people will say it doesn’t really matter, and in a sense, it doesn’t. Words are words. On the other hand, there’s something to be said for tables of contents, text that reflows properly, paragraphs that aren’t broken inappropriately, italics that are applied, spacing that depends on context… these little things have plagued type setters for hundreds of years, and it’s not about to stop just because the digital age is here. When I turn text into eBooks, I also study the visual formatting of the original source so I can replicate it as best I can.

I’m also on the side of preparing good quality quickly. This requires scripting knowledge, usually perl in my case; HTML and CSS knowledge (not huge amounts, but beyond simple websites); knowledge of wget or curl to quickly download and sanitize references for parts of websites; and knowledge of the ins and outs of extremely powerful text editors, like Vim, that pretty much qualify as on-the-fly scripting. And also the wisdom to know when you have to do something manually—although even that can be sped up with the right knowledge of the right tools. Someone commented on how many good eBooks I’ve done in what can be thought of as a short period of time; I often forget this, because the speed is now natural for me. And maybe there is some distinction here, since what I can offer up for download is dwarfed by what I make for myself.

The world online is my oyster. I just can’t share most of it with you all. This is not something I would do just because I can, legally or not; even for Creative Commons works that allow derivative work, I still ask for permission for distribution, and even so I hand over control of distribution to them if they want it. It’s enough that works can get out there legally at all for Kindles worldwide.

The nice thing about having different creative modes is that when you’re feeling horribly sorry for yourself in one mode, you can switch to the next and still be able to create something useful for other people.

So I ran into Benjamin Rosenbaum’s blog post about his story collection, The Ant King and Other Stories (hat tip to the inimitable Boing Boing). I read “Orphans”, and decided that this collection needed to be on my Kindle to peruse in the coming weeks. But while there were other formats available, there wasn’t one friendly to my Kindle.

So I made one, which is now downloadable at Small Beer Press.

I can do this and distribute it because The Ant King and Other Stories is under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. The eBook I created is also released under the same license.

What can be done with the work is optimally expressed here:

I also emailed Benjamin for permission (I don’t have to, but I prefer to, anyways) and he thought this was nice, and has forwarded the file so that Small Beer Press can post it on their CC download page for The Ant King (they’ve also got quite a few other CC works there. I’ll have to check them all out!). When they do this, I’ll remove the download link for the Mobipocket on this blog post and repoint to their site.

And now, because not everybody has a Kindle, here’s what it looks like on mine (gallery below the cut):

Continue reading “From the eBookery: Benjamin Rosenbaum’s The Ant King and Other Stories”

You know, I don’t remember this many typos happening in the original. Mostly it’s words that are nexttoeachother. A few formatting snafus brought on by perl without examination. I spent three hours today going over the eBook again, and corrected the version, replacing the incorrect file.

Same download locations:

The Annotated Watchmen - Mobipocket/Kindle
The Annotated Watchmen - PDF
The Annotated Watchmen - Sony Reader PDF

By the way, the Kindle’s highlighting feature was extremely useful in marking the mistakes. All your highlighting can be summarized in a new screen, and clicking on any takes you back to the original location. Very neat, and damn it, I wish I had this thing in college.

Nothing ever ends.

Right now interest (both mine and the Internet in general) has been stirred up again by the new movie coming out, which looks like it’ll be both a blast and taking after the mind and heart of the original work, a rarity in any movie adaptation. Which brings me to the newest addition to the S∂ eBookery.

A long time ago (which by my counting is only maybe 7 years ago) I read Alan Moore’s Watchmen with skepticism, because I could never get into the superhero genre. Probably for the same reason that I can’t get into soap operas; back then, it was the case that, generally, the best of the superhero comics consisted of Dramah!, while the worst was—well, the worst.

And Watchmen was a bit old by that time. Yet it was recommended by Warren Ellis at the time, so surely it couldn’t be bad.

Nevertheless.

Well. My skepticism evaporated long before the end of issue #1, aka chapter I, aka 11 minutes to midnight. Alan Moore is really something else—he’s a great writer, and Watchmen is an astounding marvel of storytelling. This is the storytelling you get when you have a writer steeped in non-genre (or multi-genre) knowledge, who can pull together references both within and without the plot and characters with the skill of a master weaver. If you have any aspirations towards being a storyteller yourself, you’ll hear the subtle clack-clack of the loom as the pattern weaves itself before your eyes. I remarked once, a long time ago, that Watchmen’s plot is “crystalline”—that is, it has a complicated structure that forms an intricate pattern, and every time you turn it, you see another facet.

Basically, Alan Moore is the Gene Wolfe of comics. Which means that it takes a certain amount of attention to get all of what’s going on, and a certain amount of knowledge of literature, popular music, art, and the like. For Gene Wolfe, you have help in the form of WolfeWiki to assist with the massive interweaving.

For Alan Moore, there exists multiple annotations and commentary on his works, compiled by readers who often work together as a sort of pop-culture-literary-allusion-mythopoeic-referencing hive mind. (And sometimes there’s one guy who happens to, for instance, have deep and intimate knowledge of Victorian era pulp novels and thus is the only one who can effectively annotate The League of Extraordinary Gentleman. I will never figure out how Alan Moore keeps all that in his head.)

For Watchmen, the best and most complete of these is The Annotated Watchmen by Doug Atkinson. He compiled it in the olden days, when Usenet actually meant something. There are multiple websites where this information has been preserved; I pulled mine from Enjolrasworld.com, a part of the web devoted to comic book/graphic novel annotations. (And which quaintly remarks for downloading the single-file version of the full annotations, “Beware, for those of you on a 28.8 modem, it will take nearly 2 minutes to load.”)

I prefer to do my intense reading away from the computer, so I took the time to compile the annotations into a Kindle-digestible Mobipocket eBook, also edible to those of you with Mobipocket-compatible e-readers and software.

Downloads:

The Annotated Watchmen - Mobipocket/Kindle
The Annotated Watchmen - PDF
The Annotated Watchmen - Sony Reader PDF

Screenshots under the cut:

Continue reading “From the eBookery: The Annotated Watchmen”

When I wanted to suddenly dive into Jeeves and Wooster after nearly 10 years (damn you, Charles Stross!), the first place I looked was Project Gutenberg.

Where there was a suspicious dearth of Jeeves books. Or, indeed, a drought of Wodehouse works in general. Strange, since he was a most productive writer, with over 90 books alone to his name, and many more short stories. And there are so many Jeeves fans in the world, and so many of them are lit geeks—including Isaac Asimov—it’s practically a given that, were it legal, his works would have been scanned and proofed into Project Gutenberg long since its inception in 1989.

Not a good sign for those interested in creating eBooks for public domain Wodehouse works.

Copyright has always been a thorny issue. Not only does the length that copyright holds vary by country, but the ending criteria differ. Even within the same country, copyright laws have changed multiple times.

What does it mean? It means that many of Wodehouse’s works are not public domain in most countries, despite many of said works having been in existence for what most people think is “long enough” for copyright to expire. It also means that which works are public domain and which are not vary by the country you’re currently in.

Some examples of Wodehouseian copyrights in various countries:

• All of Wodehouse’s works are still under copyright in Canada, where (as of this writing) copyright expiration is 50 years after death of author. P. G. Wodehouse died in 1975; the first time any of his works will be public domain in Canada is February 14th, 2025.

  Note that it doesn’t matter what the publication date of the work is; it could have been a pre-1910 short story, and it would still only expire in Canada in 2025.

• All of Wodehouse’s works are still under copyright in the United Kingdom, where (as of this writing) copyright expiration is 70 years after death of author. The first time his works will be public domain in the U.K. is February 14th, 2045.

• Ditto if your country is a member of the European Union.

• Whereas if you live in the Republic of Seychelles, all of Wodehouse’s works have been public domain since Valentine’s Day, 2000—copyright expires a mere 25 years after death of author.

So what about the United States? The answer: it varies.

• Wodehouse’s work published before 1923 has no copyright in the U.S. Which is why My Man Jeeves, published in 1915 in the U.K., is public domain in the U.S. and a very few other countries.

• His other work may or may not still be under a copyright that will not expire until 95 years after its first publication in the U.S.

So what’s the “may or may not” for? That’s because for works published between 1923 and 1977, copyright had to be renewed before expiration. Sometimes people forgot, or perhaps wanted their copyrights to expire in due time rather than padding on more years; only 10% of such copyrights were renewed.

Thanks to the efforts of Project Gutenberg, Distributed Proofreaders, and Stanford University, the Copyright Renewal Database was born. It’s a resource for those of us trying to find books published between 1923 and 1977 that fell into public domain; if your target doesn’t turn up in this database, it’s public domain.

What does the Copyright Renewal Database say for Wodehouse?

Fortunately for public domain, if not for the Wodehouse estate, a few (very very few) Wodehouse books fell through the “cracks” so to speak. This is the reason why Right Ho, Jeeves is public domain in the U.S. while Carry on, Jeeves is not, despite both being published after 1923.

And this is why so little of Wodehouse’s work is present in, or even eligible for, Project Gutenberg.

For the record, I respect copyright. I am happy when copyright protects the work of a living author. I am happy when it covers their funeral costs and bereavement of their surviving relatives. I begin to worry about 25 years after the original creator is dead, though. But that’s just me. If Wodehouse wanted to extend his copyrights, which he apparently did since most of the renewals were in the 1950’s, I have nothing to say against that.

More links and resources:

• Project Gutenberg
• Wodehouse’s work at Project Gutenberg
• Marie Lebert’s article on the history of Project Gutenberg, from which the copyright renewal information above was drawn
• Wikipedia: length of copyrights in various countries, do not depend on this as a conclusive legal resource
• Copyright Renewal Database over at Stanford.edu
• Distributed Proofreaders—it’s easy to join in the effort to preserve written works, in multiple languages, for the world
• U.S. Copyright Office
• Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works—the closest thing to an International Copyright Law
• Brad Templeton’s 10 Big Myths about copyright explained
• Electronic Frontier Foundation’s battle against the DMCA
• Creative Commons—an alternative to copyright for your works
• Cory Doctorow on Creative Commons

The following brand new extras from http://shadowunit.org/ have been added:

• DVD Extra #13
• DVD Extra #14
• DVD Extra #15
• “Mythology”

For those of you who are wondering, the previous version does have DVD Extra #12—entitled “Transcript”.

Version 1.3 is now available for download.

Enjoy!

Thoughts on Psmith: he’s alright, but really shines once you get into Psmith, Journalist in 1915.

Then in 1915 was born the brilliant character of Jeeves, who has since become iconic. It’s even arguable that Jeeves can be considered an archetype by now, albeit probably after a couple of beers.

Here’s the earliest second-earliest Jeeves novel, Right Ho, Jeeves, in Mobipocket format, edible to your Kindle or other Mobipocket-compatible reader. Remember, P. G. Wodehouse’s novels and stories are still in copyright in some countries, such as Canada and Britain, but the copyright has expired in still other countries, such as the U.S. Check before you download.

And in case you wanted to explore the best Psmith as well, here’s the download link for Psmith, Journalist:

You can find more P. G. Wodehouse eBooks on my downloads page, handily linked along the top of the website.