ZWIBook: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 13:14, 7 October 2024

ZWIBook is a project by Larry Sanger to put all of Project Gutenberg books, in ZWI format, on a flash drive with a bespoke reader (available for Windows, Mac, and Linux). The project will be available as a thank-you gift for those who donate $50 or more to the KSF. As of the end of July, the project is essentially ready to launch.

Known issues

Some 85 titles were deleted from the PG database for reasons relating to potential copyright issues. These will be removed from copies from October 7 and onward.
There are 34 titles found in "/book_zwis" but which are not contained in the database; therefore, while you have a copy, they are not accessible from ZWIBook. This is a known bug. The following Project Gutenberg IDs are not included as of October 6, 2024: 8776, 13395, 7366, 7766, 7844, 8555, 9304, 13320, 14398, 15083, 15258, 15891, 16187, 16188, 16189, 16190, 16883, 17073, 20144, 22662, 23057, 23063, 23326, 25105, 25107, 25109, 25726, 28876, 2953, 44800, 4978, 54963, 6036, 6672 We apologize for the issue and will supply new builds of the ZWIBook software (with installation instructions) below soon.
The Gutenberg Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, which appears to be broken in the original, causing the software to appear hang. (In fact, it will eventually load, but only a blank page, after several minutes.) Worse, the software's data about what the latest-viewed book is gets stuck, which appears to render the software unusable. This can be fixed: (1) Go to your home directory, or wherever the software data is standardly saved in your system. (2) Look (if necessary showing "hidden files") for .zwibook. (3) Inside that directory you will find latest.txt: simply delete that file and the problem will be fixed. Drives distributed after October 6, 2024 should omit the offending title.
Highlighting and bookmarking does not work in the table of contents and other front matter of some books. This is a known limitation, due to the complexity of assigning IDs to complex and unpredictable HTML. Most of the body of the text in all books is, as far as we know, bookmarkable and highlightable. There may be a few exceptions.
There are some minor styling issues (imperfectly centered text, for example). If you want to collect those issues, we might fix them in a later version.
There might still be a few books that are essentially unreadable because of styling issues. We do not currently know of any such books. We went through hundreds of books to resolve all issues we saw, but we did not test all 69,020 files in the /zwi_books folder. For such books, you can still read the HTML by exporting the ZWI (see under File), unzipping the ZWI file, and clicking on the HTML (or, if text-only, TXT) file.

Downloads

This is a placeholder. Any future updates will be downloadable in this space.

@@ Line 3: / Line 3: @@
 == Known issues ==
+# Some 85 titles were deleted from the PG database for reasons relating to potential copyright issues. These will be removed from copies from October 7 and onward.
 # There are 34 titles found in "<code>/book_zwis"</code> but which are not contained in the database; therefore, while you have a copy, they are not accessible from ZWIBook. This is a known bug. The following Project Gutenberg IDs are not included as of October 6, 2024: <code>8776, 13395, 7366, 7766, 7844, 8555, 9304, 13320, 14398, 15083, 15258, 15891, 16187, 16188, 16189, 16190, 16883, 17073, 20144, 22662, 23057, 23063, 23326, 25105, 25107, 25109, 25726, 28876, 2953, 44800, 4978, 54963, 6036, 6672</code> We apologize for the issue and will supply new builds of the ZWIBook software (with installation instructions) below soon.
-# ''The Gutenberg Webster's Unabridged Dictionary,'' which appears to be broken in the original, causes the software to hang. Worse, the software's data about what the latest-viewed book is gets stuck, which renders the software unusable. This can be fixed: (1) Go to your home directory, or wherever the software data is standardly saved in your system. (2) Look (if necessary showing "hidden files") for <code>.zwibook</code>. (3) Inside that directory you will find <code>latest.txt</code>: simply delete that file and the problem will be fixed. Versions distributed after October 6, 2024 should omit the offending title.
+# ''The Gutenberg Webster's Unabridged Dictionary,'' which appears to be broken in the original, causing the software to appear hang. (In fact, it will eventually load, but only a blank page, after several minutes.) Worse, the software's data about what the latest-viewed book is gets stuck, which appears to render the software unusable. This can be fixed: (1) Go to your home directory, or wherever the software data is standardly saved in your system. (2) Look (if necessary showing "hidden files") for <code>.zwibook</code>. (3) Inside that directory you will find <code>latest.txt</code>: simply delete that file and the problem will be fixed. Drives distributed after October 6, 2024 should omit the offending title.
-# Highlighting and bookmarking does not work in the table of contents and other front matter of some books. This is a known limitation, due to the complexity of assigning IDs to complex and unpredictable HTML. Most of the body of the text in all books is, as far as we know, bookmarkable and highlightable.
+# Highlighting and bookmarking does not work in the table of contents and other front matter of some books. This is a known limitation, due to the complexity of assigning IDs to complex and unpredictable HTML. Most of the body of the text in all books is, as far as we know, bookmarkable and highlightable. There may be a few exceptions.
 # There are some minor styling issues (imperfectly centered text, for example). If you want to collect those issues, we might fix them in a later version.
-# There might still be a few books that are essentially unreadable because of styling issues. We went through hundreds of books to resolve all issues we saw, but we did not test all 69,020 files in the <code>/zwi_books</code> folder.
+# There might still be a few books that are essentially ''unreadable'' because of styling issues. We do not currently know of any such books. We went through hundreds of books to resolve all issues we saw, but we did not test all 69,020 files in the <code>/zwi_books</code> folder. For such books, you can still read the HTML by exporting the ZWI (see under <code>File</code>), unzipping the ZWI file, and clicking on the HTML (or, if text-only, TXT) file.
 == Downloads ==
 ''This is a placeholder. Any future updates will be downloadable in this space.''