Prepare a Gutenberg text for eReading

I’m a big fan of the Gutenberg eText project. Their online royalty-free texts preserve a great literary heritage. Unfortunately, their standard 80-character wide ASCII format makes the files hard to read, particularly on PDAs. Fortunately, it’s relatively easy to convert the text into a PDA-friendly format with a simple text editor and a little know-how.

Follow the jump for the steps to convert a Gutenberg Text into a normal textwrapped file.

Gutenberg

To follow these steps, you’ll need to know how your favorite text editor searches and replaces text that includes carriage returns. I like to do my conversions on a Mac, using TextEdit; you can cut and paste carriage returns right into the Find box. Other text editors use the escape sequence \r. You may want to google for the name of your editor and “carriage return” to determine the replacement details for your program.

1. Start by stripping the top introductory portion of the book. This material, which is placed there by the Gutenberg organization, must remain for redistribution but not for personal reading. Select it and delete it.
2. Use your Find/Replace dialog to replace all double carriage returns with an easy-to-recognize string that does not occur in normal words. I use the uppercase sequence EOPEOP.
3. Replace all single carriage returns with a space. This wraps the 80-character lines into a single flow of words.
4. Replace all of your end-of-paragraph markers (i.e. EOPEOP) with a single carriage return.
5. Save your work. You can now read it directly on your PDA or convert it to an eBook using software such as ReaderWorks Standard

Die Dulci Fruere