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First BHL e-book experiments

Last week the Internet Archive announced that all their online books were now available in ePub format as well, which meant that the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) books were too. Nice when you get stuff like that for free. Anyway, I went and downloaded one of MPOW’s contributions, a particular favorite of mine, The Apples of New York. Since all of IA’s ebooks are in the open ePub format, they couldn’t be read on my Kindle without first converting it to .azw format – I used Lexcycle’s Stanza for this, but you could as easily use calibre, an open source app which has a multitude of great features. I loaded it on my Kindle, opened a copy of the ePub in the Stanza app on my iPhone, and tried reading it in the Stanza desktop app on a Mac.

Screenshots below:

Stanza desktop:

Stanza iPhone:

Kindle:

The books have some problems – there are OCR issues, but for the most part they’re remarkably readable. This is a great development, and makes the BHL material even more accessible, an important part of the consortium’s mission.