Lit Problem

[digiSal]

.lit files are Microsoft eBook Reader files. I have, or had, a problem with one Stephen King book. Words were being cut off on the edge of the reader. It looked like a word wrapping problem, but there are no such settings in reader. I looked around awile back for lit converter but most sites said that there was no known LIT converter. You can convert files to LIT but you couldnt convert LIT to anything else. Now, i wasn't about to believe that this couldn't be done. There are many people out there who get a kick out of doing things that say can't be done.

So I searched.

[read more]

I like to think that I have good Google skills, so after a few searches I found what I was looking for.

www.convertlit.com

How easy is that?

Its a DOS based program. How does it work? I don't know, but i'll tell you how to use it.

Once downloaded and unzipped put the clit.exe and the dll in the same folder as the LIT you want to convert and open up a command prompt. Navigate to the folder and type clit. You get a readme when doing this. Say your LIT file is named Book.lit. You would type this

clit book.lit book\

this will create another directory called book to put the new files in it. You can also put it in an existing directory also, or in the same directory as the LIT. When it is done you will get an HTML file and some image files, which are cover pages. From here you can do what you will with the file.

I am converting back to LIT to try and get the formatting correct. As an HTML file my formatting was still screwed, the words were still cutoff, but i just copied the whole txt and pasted it in WordPad and I should be good to go from there.

[digiSal]

I used ReaderWorks to convert TXT files to LITs before and it worked pretty good, but I accidently uninstalled it, and before installing it again, i did a few searches for other converters, and found a link to www.aximsite.com (how ironic) which pointed me to an MS Word Plugin to Save Word files to LIT.

http://office.microsoft.com/downloads/2002/wdReader.aspx

Worked very well!!! It even let me add my own Cover and Library Image, which ReadetWorks standard doesn't let me do.

So now I get to try and read the King book I been wanting to read for sometime, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. I don't know what it is about, but the title sounds good.

Laters...

--Sal-

[digiSal]

Then I remembered about Speed Reader Plus.
http://www.mobiledynamo.com/prod01.htm

I converted to this also. The conversion process is pretty simple here. You simply open the Speed Reader Library Utility, then open the Document you want to convert and Select All the Text and hit Ctrl-C. If you used MS Reader then you know you can't do a Select all of all the books pages, so I had to convert back to txt file to do this to the LIT.

The Library Utility will then copy the contents of your clipboard, every time you do a copy it gets saved to the clipboard, into its Utility. From here all do is give it a name and click Send to Pocket PC. And you can Speed Read. Its a little wierd at first, because you are being flashed one word at a time, but afterwhile you want it to flash faster and faster until before you know it you reading pages and pages at a time. I have to tell it to Pause a little for big words though. Its a cool little App. Afterawhile you want to read everything this way.

--Sal-

[La_Thumbelina]

Man I wish I was Tech Savvy, so I can participate in these discussions.  I envy ... I envy.  

[neuromancer]

Ok I'll piggy back this thread. First off thanks for the info and the links.

Now Sal, you had a thread somewhere or a tute posted up on how to shag files off Usenet. I can't find it. I loaded up XNews last night and started scrounging for .lit files. I found some interesting stuff in the Usenet group you talked about.  I need to know how to re-join (?) the serperate files (some books come across in 19 files) and I guess without putting the horse in front of the cart I'm having a hell of a time saving the files onto the hard drive in the first place. I see some coming across but they are nowhere to be found. Steer me towards your post from way back? I found a link at Tim's that you mentioned it but it was on the old forum I think.

David

[digiSal]

Man I wish I was Tech Savvy, so I can participate in these discussions.  I envy ... I envy.  

Hey! Where there is a will there is a way!

What kind of tech savviness would you like to acquire, maybe we can help ya out...hehe  

[digiSal]

here is the link to my Xnews post from back in the day. I shall rewrite this as an article sometime soon.
Xnews Tute

Now, them 19 files you downloaded are probably .RAR . So download winRAR and then highlight all 19 files, then click on Extract here and it will pull the archive out of those files.

Simple eh?

i recommend these groups for ebooks

alt.binaries.e-book
alt.binaries.e-book.palm
alt.binaries.e-book.technical
alt.binaries.warez.pocketpc.lit

Hopefully your internet provider carries those groups, if not you can email them and usually they will add the group within a week or so. If you would like to discuss Xnews and file downloading further, please, lets start another thread. A lot of crap can go into  it, like PARs, SFVs, and NFOs...

--Sal-

Ok I'll piggy back this thread. First off thanks for the info and the links.

Now Sal, you had a thread somewhere or a tute posted up on how to shag files off Usenet. I can't find it. I loaded up XNews last night and started scrounging for .lit files. I found some interesting stuff in the Usenet group you talked about.  I need to know how to re-join (?) the serperate files (some books come across in 19 files) and I guess without putting the horse in front of the cart I'm having a hell of a time saving the files onto the hard drive in the first place. I see some coming across but they are nowhere to be found. Steer me towards your post from way back? I found a link at Tim's that you mentioned it but it was on the old forum I think.

David

[neuromancer]

Yup, thanks for that tute link.

I downed about 10 .pdp books off of alt.binaries.e-book.palm. They were single file books so it was a no brainer (as soon as I figured out the save attachment deal.)

Another good group is alt.binaries.e-book.flood. A lot of straight txt files that you can convert to whatever format you want. I snagged William Gibson's "The Difference Engine" there. So far they look like good txt files ... as in no line breaks that you often get with Guttenburg. Speaking of Guttenburg ... I found some off-shore links where they have different copywrite limits so more to choose from. They have a no USA access page but it is just loaded with a warning and the file links work ... hahahaha.

Lots of fun ...

David

[digiSal]

I think i might of read you talking about Gibson so awhile back I snagged the Bridge Trilogy, Burning Chrome,  and Mona Lisa Overdrive.

ill put them up at a.b.pocketpc.lit so you can grab em. They are LIT files, but if you use the program mentioned above you can convert them to htm then to pdbs.

This will be a good test to see how long they show up on your ISPs servers.

I put them up about 1220am CST

 

[neuromancer]

Way cool! This crap f*king rules. I will play with conversion this week as I have time. If you run across "Pattern Recognition" Gibson's latest work give a shout out ...

David

[neuromancer]

Thanks again for the heads up on convertlit. I finally found a copy of William Faulkner's "The Sound and The Fury" on alt.binaries.warez.pocketpc.lit and converted to HTML. I then opened the file in Word and saved as a Word document and let Documents To Go convert to PDB for the Palm. Ran like a charm. Also picked up Faulkner's "Light In August". I ran iSiloX to convert these files also but I do not like the way iSiloX converts/renders italics. It kinda chops them midpoint down the font? I can probably configure somewhere in the program but so far I have been using Palm Reader anyway to read converted PDB's. Manly using iSiloX as a replacement for the AvantGo type thing.

David

[Weave]

clit is the crap! Fun to type, too. Thanks for the heads up on that!