Wednesday, November 29, 2006

I thought this would be cool ...

... but it isn't. Mobipocket's Ultimate Handheld Classic Library.

I'm not happy with this at all. Instead of giving you a separate file for each book, the books are clustered into giant files, one per author. If you want to read Dickens, you better have TEN MEGABYTES free on your device, 'cause that's how big the Dickens file is. Here are the actual 23 files you get (these aren't zips containing smaller files; these are single giant Mobipocket files containing several books or works):

Alexandre Dumas - 5092KB
Alfred Lord Tennyson - 2051KB
Charles Dickens - 10176KB
Charlotte Bronte - 1111KB
Edgar Allan Poe - 996KB
Henry W Longfellow - 1002KB
Herman Melville - 1556KB
Jack London - 4960KB
James Fenimore Cooper - 6603KB
Jane Austen - 1470KB
Jules Verne - 986KB
Leo Tolstoy - 3251KB
Louisa May Alcott - 2588KB
Lucy Maud Montgomery - 1756KB
Mark Twain - 5563KB
Nathaniel Hawthorne - 3593KB
Oscar Wilde - 1096KB
Robert Louis Stevenson - 5128KB
Sir Walter Scott - 7118KB
Washington Irving - 2492KB
William Shakespeare - 2109KB
William Thackeray - 5439KB
Wuthering Heights - 282KB



3 Comments:

At November 29, 2006 8:36 PM , Anonymous don said...

I have a CD of 450 books that's very similar. It's one giant text file.

Like who's the moron that decides these formats? Obviously an engineer that never uses what he designs.

 
At December 11, 2006 2:37 PM , Anonymous Justy said...

I got the same set of classics. I was very disappointed to find that not only were all the works for an author in the same file, but they were not in order. For the authors who are known for thier series' this is an issue. Makes it hard to navigate around.

I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time. :)

 
At December 11, 2006 2:41 PM , Blogger RobertJSawyer said...

Hi, Justy. Yeah, it was disappointing. I get very angry about the blunders made by ebook marketers. This business should have taken off long ago, but they keep doing boneheaded things! :)

 

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