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Here's a quick, free, cross platform way to make iPod ebooks. I'm heading off to Etech next week and since I'll have my iPod with me most of the time I figured I'd ebookify the conference schedule...Here's how to do it -
Visit the ebook creator site here. I cut and pasted the text from the Etech schedule, and cleaned up the text a bit- saved it as Etech.txt.
1. Choose the .txt file on the site, name it and upload.
2. Download the zip file the ipod-ebook-creator makes.
3. Unzip the file and place the entire folder in the notes section of your iPod.
If you can't access your iPod to add the files to the iPod you'll need to enable disk mode. In iTunes- Edit > Preferences iPod Tab > General > Select "Enable disk use".
4. Unplug your iPod from your computer go to Extras > Notes and open the first file. At the end of the file there's a link that will go to the next file automatically.
And here's the result!
Here's the original text file and here's the zip file for you Etech'ers.
The next issue of Make will have a ton, and I mean a ton of ways to stuff like this and more on your iPod including everything all about a secret kiosk mode and how to use it for some cool projects.
Why on earth would you want to download e-books onto your i-Pod? The truth is i-Pods aren't good at this. I used a Palm V-series for years as an e-book reader only because I had no option - nothing better out there at the time that was light, portable and I could read while standing up in a bus or Metro holding on to a pole with one hand - and the palm displays much more text than an i-Pod! Today's handhelds, however, have the screen real estate and resolution necessary to make reading e-books a pleasure. Convergence is still incomplete for those of us who max the functionality on our devices.
The way you are proposing using it really doesn't fit with its functions either - use a PDA or even a cell/PDA if all you want is agenda functionality. A used but relatively new PDA on eBay isn't that expensive.
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Technology should be a pleasure to use and not onerous.
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hey quad4b....just because it
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lets try again....just because it is not useful to quad4b does not mean it is not useful to anyone. The most useful device is the one you always carry (i.e. I don't want to carry anything else). In my case, it is my Nokia 3650 smart phone, though an iPod would works just as well if I carried it everywhere.
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Hmmm. It only seems to work with small books - not novels? All my .txt books were too big but it works with smaller files.
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