Books I Did Not Read This Year: an Ebook

by Kieran Healy on December 9, 2011

"Books I Did Not Read This Year."

I’ve been using the Readmill ebook reader on-and-off. I like it quite a bit. Using it prompted me to make an ebook of my own. Because I moved my own website over to Octopress a little while ago, everything I’ve ever written on it going back to 2002 is now in Markdown format. So over lunch yesterday I took advantage of John MacFarlane’s amazingly useful Pandoc, which can make EUPB format ebooks out of markdown files, selected thirteen posts from the Archives and made a little anthology called Books I Did Not Read This Year (epub). It’s free to download, because I’m such a generous person. Enjoy it on Readmill, iBooks, your or any other EPUB-compatible reader. Daniel kindly made a Mobi version for Kindle owners. I plan on making a few more of these, forming a Press (e.g. “Harbard University Press” or “Pengiun”), and then adding them to my Vita.

{ 11 comments }

1

rea 12.09.11 at 12:41 pm

Harbard University Press” or “Pengiun”

I advise you to cultivate a relationship with a good trademark lawyer . . .

2

David Littleboy 12.09.11 at 1:53 pm

Just call it “Vas Ist Das” press. At least all the tech nerds will understand…

3

Henry 12.09.11 at 2:17 pm

I’ve been wanting to install Pandoc for quite a while (working back and forward between LaTeX and rtf can be a massive pain in the arse), but am frightened by Haskell …

4

Doug 12.09.11 at 3:14 pm

Blinkenlights Press.

5

tomslee 12.09.11 at 4:46 pm

Could you or someone give us a list of the posts you selected?

6

bemused 12.09.11 at 6:10 pm

Also see Calibre (which is an ebook manager and converts from and to many formats) and fbreader app for android (open source epub reader available from the Android Marketplace.)

7

gordon 12.09.11 at 11:31 pm

So glad to see I’m not the only person with a stack of old Penguins that I’m going to read sometime!

8

ben w 12.11.11 at 10:43 pm

You don’t need to know any Haskell to use Pandoc, unless you want to write custom filters/processors against the Pandoc API. Also, for all its initial forbiddingness, it is possible to use Haskell without being a wizard.

Also, some of these pieces aren’t unlike some of Eco’s stuff as collected in e.g. How to Travel with a Salmon or Misreadings, so if he can put them on his CV (can he? has he? beats me) I don’t see why Kieran can’t put this on his.

9

The Raven 12.12.11 at 3:25 pm

Charming little ebook. :-)

10

Wax Banks 12.12.11 at 4:11 pm

Because I moved my own website over to Octopress a little while ago, everything I’ve ever written on it going back to 2002 is now in Markdown format.

Could you clarify this for me? You switched from (some other platform) to Octopress and the latter converted your posts, presumably from HTML, to Markdown as its internal format?

Oh man, that sounds like Christmas in…December…to me.

11

Yseult 12.13.11 at 9:18 am

What a nice way to dig back into some old posts I’d never had the pleasure of reading otherwise.

Thank YOU!

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