Instead of an e-Book

The full text of Benjamin Tucker's Instead of a Book, By a Man Too Busy to Write One—a hard-to-find classic of radical libertarianism—is now online.

For more on Tucker, go here.

[Via Rad Geek.]

Comments

[iih]

Jesse,

This isn’t very Internets savvy link you provide for the book. Is there a complete pdf or something?

[Thomas Paine\'s Goiter]

This isn’t very Internets savvy link

You are confused by links?!?!

[iih]

TPG:

No, I am wondering if there is a pdf version.

[iih]

TPG:

Yeah, I know that I am spoiled.

[Grant Gould]

Pretty clever, putting an ebook online in exactly none of the formats that common ebook readers support.

If I have some spare time I’ll try to scrape it and throw together text and rtf versions (for my own benefit, of course: My old PRS-500 can handle those). I do this fairly often with Microsoft ebooks, so I’ve got the scripts lying around already.

[iih]

Grant:

That’d be good.

[Brandybuck]

Is there something about plain vanilla HTML that you guys can’t handle? An open and standardized format like HTML allows me to read the book from my desktop system, my laptop. the public library, an iPhone, etc, etc. f any complaint is to be made, it is that there is no alternet stylesheet for small devices.

[Grant Gould]

HTML is a fine thing, but without a format with the content on a single page it’s hard to read it offline (eg on an ebook reader). It also makes converting to other formats a matter of simple copy-and-paste. This is why most online books have a “one big HTML file” option.

[Brandybuck]

The book sources are DocBook, so it’s a trivial matter to generate a single HTML file or PDF. Someone just needs to ask.

[Grant Gould]

Right. Two more formats:
One-big-html-page
RTF (best format for Sony readers)

For PDF, you could load up the one-big-html version and convert it yourself — I don’t have a print-to-pdf widget handy.

[Grant Gould]

…or Brandybuck could beat me to it. Your conversion would probably be cleaner than mine anyway, as mine is just some shell scripts I use to convert things for my portable reader or shoehorn them into OpenOffice for editing.

[Rad Geek]

N.B.: I haven’t started producing PDFs of the documents that I put on Fair Use, but I hope to one day. For those who are both impatient and savvy about DocBook and XSLT, the DocBook XML source is already available online, at http://fair-use.org/benjamin-tucker/instead-of-a-book/instead-of-a-book.book

I’d do it myself, but I’m a stickler about formatting, and am currently working on other projects. But if anyone produces a good-looking PDF from the DocBook source, I’d be glad to get a copy of that to post at fair-use.org. The person who generated it would get credit, of course.

[iih]

Rad Geek:

Thanks. It would be great to get the pdf version one day. I honestly don’t know what to make of or do with the link you provided. PDFs are always good.

[Jock Coats]

I know this is a rather old thread, but some of the links in comments that point to alternative versions of “Instead of a Book” appear to be dead, so I grabbed the DocBook file and converted it myself into a PDF, a single page HTML and a single page XHTML, since I intend to do an Audiobook version of it and wanted something easier on the eye than the facsimile version of the print edition that arrived in the mail today!

You’ll find all three formats, zipped up, at my blog. Feel free to do as you wish with them.