OK, this is how I always wanted the RetroRead experience to be — you simply point at a search result on Google, and bam! it’s converted, all in the background, no file downloading.
It’s a little tricky, particularly since Google really expects a human behind the wheel of a browser to interact with their download urls. After a while of repeated downloads from the same url, they begin to suspect that someone is “crawling” the site. Not so here – every download request is triggered individually by a user at a browser;only, the request is “proxied” through the RetroRead servers so that it can be delivered at high speed to the target conversion service, rather than downloaded and re-uploaded at “last mile” speeds. There is still a little latency, but “more or less” — all you need to do is click, and either the book is queued for conversion right away, or (as we recommend), queued for “editing” of the extraneous front matter. It’s really a dream!
Searching Google’s book library is done through a Google Books feed search, and only titles with epub downloads are returned in the search results. There is also a nifty “preview” feature — click on the title and a “Google Books Preview” view is displayed.
If the site gets busy, you may be asked to enter a “Captcha” response — this is Google’s way of making sure there really is human there.
Happy converting (I mean EDITING and converting).
