BLITZES at bltcpress

service update

david — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 05:18:02 +0000

.. experience outage Sunday December 11; forced reboot by AWS which yours truly was not quite on top of, should be fine now.

Notable in passing: in Memoriam Michael S. Hart

david — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 00:41:53 +0000

Founder of Project Gutenberg Obituary:

Phew!

david — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 04:54:39 +0000

Finally tweaked the site so that the “new” method of directly fetching books from books.google.com is the default/standard way of doing conversion. The original download/upload interface remains available at http://www.retroread.com/gbif/

Enjoy and please advise if there are any issues!

Still here

david — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 16:53:30 +0000

… things have been a bit quiet here and also, RetroRead update-wise. Pleased to see things are apparently (plus or minus an Amazon EC2 blackout) running pretty smoothly, in particulalry with “Retro Rocket”. I hope everyone is using this, it is due to switch over to the default “creation” option (when I get time — things in land of “day job” have been a bit demanding …).

Google Books settlement rejected

david — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 04:35:46 +0000

Now what?

Thousands of Titles!

david — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 17:49:58 +0000

… Retroread can now lay claim to hosting “thousands” of converted Kindle titles, the recent “blitz” of conversions by the “Schlegelphile” out there has pushed the title count to over 2000! I love it when someone finds a trove of … Continue reading →

RetroRocket – conversion the way it was meant to be

david — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 06:30:41 +0000

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).

Are there a few beta testers out there?

david — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 04:42:29 +0000

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been working on the “next step” in the RetroRead service — the ability to directly move books from Google into the conversion workflow, without having to download them to your desktop. It’s pretty neat, and *super* fast — search, edit, and go!

This requires a bit of care and a few tricks to try and stay on the good side of Google’s throttling features. I’d like to get a little more field testing done before just turning it loose (to ultimately replace the Google search in iframe implementation).

Just send us a note at info@retroread.com, we’ll sign you up and show you how to access this new feature.

How to video on YouTube

david — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 17:46:30 +0000

Just posted a walk-through video of the flow of searching, downloading, uploading, and editing of a Google epub through RetroRead into Kindle format. Hope it encourages more users to take the plunge and do some of their own conversions! It’s … Continue reading →

Feed Happy

david — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 02:50:43 +0000

Recently we added an option to allow others to view your personal library at a custom RetroRead url. (/mylibrary/myusername).

Now for those who care to share, your personal library page (if you have one) now sports an RSS feed (you should see the feed icon in your browser’s url bar) which generates a feed for your books. If you have your own blog, you can add this feed to it, for example. (The url btw is, surprise!, /mylibrary/myusername/rss.xml).

Enjoy!