Owners of the Nokia N770 and N800 handhelds, as well as other FBReader users, can enjoy free copyrighted books—some by major novelists such as the late Kurt Vonnegut.
The secret is to download the books from the ad-supported Wowio service. And then open up the freebies with the free Mobipocket Desktop to convert them into Mobi, which FBReader can use. Sorry, but Mobi Desktop is for Windows only even though it can send files to handhelds with other operating systems, including, of course, linux.
Do not open up Wowio books with a PDF reader, or Mobipocket Desktop may not be able to convert them.
Rendition easily good enough
Unlike uBook, which has its own glories, the latest FBReader displays the Wowio books without weird characters appearing on most every page. The rendition isn’t perfect—the table of contents might lack line breaks—but it was easily good enough on the two books I tested.
Books available range from Michael Moore and Anna Nicole Smith biographies to novels by Kurt Vonnegut, William Styron and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, as well as by classics now in the public domain.
Image: Of Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions as published originally in hardback by Delacorte Press.
Related: Nokia N770’s White Screen of death: The lowdown from Internet Table Talk.
Wowio looks interesting — what a shame that us people outside the USA can’t get access to it. Seems like the Copyright Police have already won this one.
I had some problems converting pdfs to mobipocket format. The only thing I did differently was open them beforehand in adobe acrobat. I can’t see what difference that could have made though.
[…] Rothman from Teleread reports that you can convert the wowio PDFs to mobipocket format on Mobipocket desktop’s import program. I tried it and generally can confirm it works. But […]