Mr. Shakespeare's blog

Birthday Presents

To celebrate Shakespeare's birthday, here are three birthday presents for us web/tech types:

First, The Complete Shakespeare Reader 1.0 for PC only from Download.com.  Here is the blurb:

The Free Electronic Shakespeare Reader is a downloadable piece of software that you can install on any Windows computer, and instantly have all of Shakespeare's 38 plays at your fingertips. No internet connection required [once you have downloaded, that is]; read plays at your leisure on any computer. An excellent study resource for any English Literature student. Provides in-depth full-text searching to all of Shakespeare's plays.

It has a three-panel layout:  an index to the complete works in the left frame, the text in a central pane, and a scenes TOC on the right.  It also features a pop-up notepad to take notes on any of the plays while you read, a full-screen mode, and, best of all, a search feature.  This is a desktop client program.  The text appears to be the public domain, universal moby text used by Project Gutenberg and MIT, and one of the down sides is that there are absolutely no notes, glosses or critical apparatus.  Of course, one might not regard this as a down side, but I do.  The non-dramatic poetry is not included.  J. D. Biersdorfer, who featured this download in the Times, suggests that it is "great for netbook reading."  Maybe.  It depends on how you feel about reading from your vertical LCD.

If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch you may be interested in a giveaway from the Apple iTunes App store called "Readdle Shakespeare."  (I know.  When will it stop?)  It is a joint effort between Readdle and PlayShakespeare.com, containing "Full, high-quality texts of 40 plays...All six poems and all 154 sonnets, searchable condordance," etc.  Find it through iTunes at the app store.  It is free, which is a good thing.  In my opinion the iPod Touch and iPhone screen is just too small to be an effective e-reader, but the search functionality might be useful in a pinch.

The application settings allow for turning on a page scroll by tap feature, changing text color, and adjusting font size by choosing from among seven sizes from tiny to Largest.  The Search functionality is across all works, and the text seems to be a custom hybrid text.  Using the downloadable reader mentioned above and searching for "petard" will find Hamlet, 3.4.225 "Hoist with his own petard."  Searching the Readdle app for the same term will return nothing.  Searching for "petar" however, will return Hamlet Act III (nothing more specific).  Both applications will jump to the passage in context.  Once again, there are no glosses or student helps, just the text, of a sort.  No explanation of why "petar" is used rather than "petard."  Granted, most won't care, but many will, especially in an academic context.

The main problem with the Readdle app, of course, is that the iPod screen is just to small for extended reading.  At larger font sizes the lines do not break appropriately and there are too few words on the screen to read smoothly.  Even at the tiniest font size this is a problem.  Furthermore, to do a search you have to use the iPhone's (or iPod's) dinky littly touch sensitive onscreen keyboard to type in the term, which is less than pleasant.  In short, the footprint is just too small, but, what do you want for free?

A third free alternative, if you have an Amazon Kindle, is to search the Kindle store for Shakespeare.  Then sort the search results by price from Low to High.  You will find quite a number of free editions.  Surprisingly, you will find quite a number of old books related to Shakespearean topics, like A. C. Swinburne's A Study of Shakespeare, Frank Harris' (!) old bio, Shakespeare The Man, or C. M. Ingleby's Shakespeare's Bones, a work that sounds like it will be enormously interesting but is dry as, yes, bones. 

A search at the Kindle store on Shakespeare Complete Works, appropriately sorted by price from low to high, shows that at Amazon you will not find a complete works edition that is free, but many for very low costs.  You must be very careful when searching the Kindle store, however.  The blurbs associated with many works have nothing to do with the work you are downloading.  For instance, a search for this edition of the Complete Works would lead you to believe that you are getting a copy of the Bevington 6th edition text.  Not at all.  It is just another download of a public domain text, with no notes or critical apparatus, but the blurb makes you believe otherwise.  For 99 cents, however, it ain't bad.

Amazon is not the only place to get eBooks, however.  There are scads of them free at Project Gutenberg.  You can find the Complete Works in both mobi and epub formats here.

When is open not open?

The Amazon Kindle 2 is a huge hit, and deservedly so.  It dominates the e-Reader market--or has up to now, anyway.  In an effort to surpass Amazon Sony signed an agreement with Google to provide over 500,000 public domain books free on their competing e-Reader platform. 

Google has scanned some 7,000,000 books since 2004 as part of the Google Book Search project, mostly from both publicly and privately supported libraries, but from book publishers and individual authors as well.   Some  of the books in the public domain (frustratingly not all, by any means)  have been made fully viewable and readable on the Google Book Search site and via a downloadable PDF document.  Books under copyright can be searched and viewed in "Snippet View" which shows very limited portions of the text.  Books publishers do not want seen at Google have bibliographic entries, and links to purchase them, but cannot be viewed.  Now Google, inexplicably--unless you want to believe they have a vested interested in putting pressure on Amazon--has entered into a closed sharing arrangement with Sony via the ePub ebook format.  It appears to be "open," and, indeed, ePub is an open format, easily convertible to mobi format, which can be read on the Amazon Kindle.  But there is a catch.

"We have focused our efforts on offering an open platform and making it easy to find as much content as possible, and our partnership with Google is another step in that direction," said Steve Haber, president of the digital reading business division of Sony Electronics. 

Unfortunately, this is not true.  The only way to read the books on Sony's platform is within their proprietary desktop reader, or on their hardware device, which competes head to head with the Kindle.  Their commitment to openness ends at their doorstep, and they do not make the files in the open ePub format available for conversion to the Kindle, nor does Google, who should, if they are really committed to openness. 

"Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon's chief executive, has said that works in the public domain, like those Google is making available to Sony, are easy to get since there are no copyrights attached" (NY Times). 

This is partly true.  Many are.  Some aren't so easy to find in a format that can be loaded on the Kindle.   But in either case, there is a larger social problem here.  Google, using their influence to shape the eBook commercial market through strategic corporate alliances based on content ultimately provided via public funds, begs the question why can't ALL of the public, regardless of the reading device, have easy access to these titles in a format that can be easily imported to an eReader?  Google might respond that the public does, via the PDF format that is freely downloadable, but the PDF format does not port smoothly to the Kindle.  It ports, but not with the same properties normal ebooks have, like font sizing and reflow.  It is a case of "open" not actually meaning "open." 

I don't mean to be overly critical of Google.  Their Book Search project is a marvel and a true public good.  So why make it easy for only a portion of the public to fully enjoy it at this point? Let's hope that Google does the right thing, rather than trying to influence the ebook reader market or put pressure on Amazon to come to an agreement with them, and make their ePub formats freely downloadable, as Project Gutenberg does.

Burning CDs and DVDs with Windows Vista

Regular readers of the blog will know that I post on technology topics occasionally, and today is one of those occasions.  I like Windows Vista.  (I'm not ashamed to say it, either).  I especially like the ability to incrementally write to the same CD-R or DVD-R over time and across various computers (as long as they are running Vista--these same discs can be read, but not written to with XP).  In any event, here is a technology column I did recently on this topic.

Windows Vista has two file systems that it can use to burn CD and DVD data disks.  I'm not talking now about music CDs or video DVDs.  I'm talking about data (files and folders) saved to a CD or DVD from your Windows Vista workstation.

The two new file systems, or ore correctly "formats," are called Live File System format and "Mastered" format.  The default is Live File System, but it is important to know the difference.  Let's walk through the steps of writing data to a CD-R (this discussion with minor variations discussed later applies to CD-RWs also).

First, insert a blank CD-R into the CD-RW or DVD-RW drive (DVD-RW drives can also write CDs, but CD-RW drives cannot write to DVDs).  You will see something like the following dialog box.

I say "something like" this dialog box because its contents will vary depending on the software you have installed.  If you have the Roxio, Nero, or other CD/DVD burning utilities on your system you will see choices for them.  For our purposes of using Windows Vista to burn your disk, choose "Burn files to disc" as illustrated.  You will see a dialog where you can enter a volume title, like this:

As indicated in the illustration above, the Live File System makes your CD almost like a floppy disk.  You can add files to it over time, and from different computers, and continue to do so until you "close" it.  (See below).  When you "erase" a file from it, however, you do not regain the space on the disc on CD-R media.  Windows Vista actually burns pits into the disk surface, writing files as you go.  "Erasing" one of these files eliminates any reference to it in the file allocation structure, so that it appears to be gone from the CD, but the pits are still really there, which is why you can't re-write that part of the disc and why you cannot regain the disc space taken up by an "erased" file.  The one down side to using the Live File System is that it is only readable by Windows Vista and Windows XP operating systems.  It cannot be read on earlier systems, or on other devices.

After clicking "Next" from the Burn a Disc dialog, your CD-R will be formatted:

Then the Windows Explorer (Vista version) will appear and you can begin adding files to the disc.  You can copy and paste them onto the CD-RW drive, as it is represented in the Windows Explorer, or drag them there, or right-click and "Send To" them there.  It doesn't matter.  As soon as you begin adding files to the Explorer window, the CD-RW drives begins writing them to the disc. 

You can return to add more files later.  If you eject the disc, Windows will tell you it is closing the session so that the disc can be used on other computers.  This does not mean that you can no longer add files to the disc.  As long as you use the disc on another Windows Vista computer, you can continue to add or "erase" files.  If you remove the disc and take it to a Windows XP computer, however, you will be able to read the disc, but not add to it. 

The drawback, if it is one, with the Live File System is that discs created with it cannot be read on non-Windows Vista or XP computers, or CD/DVD players.  To make a disc that is compatible with the widest array of equipment, you should use the "Mastered" format.  If you have ever created a data CD with Windows XP, you know how the Mastered format works.  You select files from throughout your file system and "place" them on the disc.  What actually happens is that pointers to the files get placed in a temporary work space.  They are not actually written to the disc until you issue the write command.  One write operation occurs, and then the disc is finalized so that it cannot be used again.  Here is an illustration of files waiting to be written to disc.

Click the "Burn to disc" button (or just right-click anywhere in the window and choose "Burn to disc" to perform the write operation.  When done, Windows will finalize the disc, and offer to write another:

When you create a disc using the Live File System, Windows will not offer to burn another because it writes as it goes.  With the Mastered format Windows knows the disc is complete, but still retains the pointers to the files to be written in a temporary location.  If you choose not to create another disc, the pointers will be erased and the disc ejected.

Which format is best?  Obviously, they serve different purposes.  It's nice to have the option of adding and deleting files from a CD or DVD using the Live File System, and especially useful for incremental backups.  On the other hand, if you move between many computers and need to be sure you can read your data on any device, then the Mastered format is what you should use.