Voluminous: app for organizing, fetching and sharing public domain books

Voluminous is a subscription-based public domain book delivery program. Once you buy the app, it'll let you know whenever likely books are scanned and put online; they also keep a bookmarkable library for you.

There are literally tens of thousands of books. Voluminous makes it faster and easier to find the ones you want. Would you rather waste your time hunting around for them, or have Voluminous do it for you?

Voluminous also:

* Will tell you when new books are available
* Keeps automatic bookmarks for each book in your personal library. If you read a book on a webpage, your web browser will only bookmark that web page (typically, the start of the book), not where you've read to.
* Tracks which books you're currently reading, for quick access
* Takes "plain text" and turns it into a beautifully laid-out book in the style you choose
* Offers full-screen mode for distraction-free reading
* Has tools to share interesting books with friends

These are just some of the advantages of using Voluminous.

Link (via Wonderland)

• [semiotix]

  Leopard only? Yowch. Am I the only one who thinks that’s an odd choice?

• [yesno]

  Leopard has a number of features that make life easier for devs. More Mac apps that you’d think are Leopard only.

• [semiotix]

  @7: Fair enough. What confused me was the matter of market share, which would seem to be important to this kind of application–i.e., one that will need some attention and support going forward, not just something that you can wash your hands of once you’ve sold the software. But I can see how it would be offset by other considerations.

• [mrklingon]

  Not quite the same thing, but for Windows users there is this – http://www.spacejock.com/yBook.html

  It’s a freeware pdb, text, html and rtf ebook reader – has a nifty “Gutenberg project” feature that will download the latest Gutenberg listing – then you can search it and download any book.

  Lets you customize the look of the book, do full screen, etc.

• [fulltext]

  Another alternative is NetBook. Written in Adobe Air and cross-platform, it lets you search the Gutenberg database, download and read/listen to ebooks and audiobooks. Available here -

  http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/exchange/index.cfm?event=extensionDetail&loc=en_us&extid=1328518

• [Robert]

  For me, the ability to convert xyz format into pdfs is the important thing, since I already have an ebook reader — the iRex iLiad. I currently use a hacked-up program I wrote to convert rtf, txt, and html to pdf, which compensates for various incompatible codings of accented and other characters such as left- and right-quotes and em- and en-dashes, as well as the txt craziness of one-paragraph-per-line or one-line-per-line.

  Can any of these programs do that?

• [proto]

  Great. Now my life is ruined for the next three weeks.

• [Droogy]

  I was p*ssed to see it’s only for Leopard – Why? WHY?

• [Strange Quark Star]

  Snow Crash, anyone?

• [Kieran O’Neill]

  I use FBReader, which comes installed by default on the EEE, and seems to be as good as it gets for Linux. Does most of what Voluminous seems to, apart from integrating with Gutenberg, and supports plenty of formats.

  (Oh yeah, and it’s free.)