A few months ago I jumped on the e-reader bandwagon, and purchased the latest version of Amazon’s Kindle device. By and large I’m extremely pleased with it; reading Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on a device that bears an uncanny resemblance to the eponymous guide itself ( something I’m not the first to notice ), brings me no end of amusement.

Nonetheless, many of the commercial e-books available via Amazon’s store leave much to be desired in terms of their suitability for reading on the device, largely down to cheap and/or lazy conversions, making some of the more expensive titles a dubious investment. There is, however, a vast library of free, out of copyright content provided by websites like Project Gutenberg. Being free, it would be churlish to complain about matters of style and formatting, particularly when this is easy to rectify with access to the source and a small amount of technical knowledge. For full details on creating content for the Kindle, see the Amazon Kindle Publishing Program.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner is one of many out of copyright texts provided by Project Gutenberg, in both epub and the Kindle’s native mobipocket format, kindly produced by Judy Boss and David Widger. However, as can be seen in the screenshots below from Amazon’s Kindle Previewer program, the formatting could do with some polish. Additionally, it is unillustrated, which is a shame because Gustav Doré’s wonderful artwork is also available in the public domain, at least in the resolution required for an ebook, from http://dore.artpassions.net/.

Using the plain html file as a starting point, converting it directly results in a file that looks much like the mobi file on Project Gutenberg. However, with access to the source, we can do a bit better.

Formatting the text for Kindle

I’m using XSLT 2.0 to create the xhtml source for Amazon’s kindlegen tool. As with the Prime Ministerial debates project, the input file needs cleaning up before passing it to an XSLT transformation tool such as Saxon.

Following the suggestions here : http://www.xmlplease.com/xhtmlxhtml, I made the following changes to the input document to prepare it for processing

1. Added xml header
2. Removed HTML DTD. If you don’t do this, most XSLT processors will try to resolve the DTD over the network and take forever as a result.
3. Added ENTITY declarations for any named HTML character entities used in the source, such as ‘—’
4. Removed any invalid xhtml such as orphaned <br> and <hr> tags.

Having done that, the document should parse. The snippet below uses XSLT 2.0′s regular expression support to add line breaks to the text, and wrap each verse in paragraph blocks.

<xsl:template match="xhtml:pre">
 <div>
 <xsl:for-each select="tokenize(string(.),'nn')">
  <p><xsl:text>&#10;</xsl:text>
  <xsl:analyze-string select="." regex="n">
   <xsl:matching-substring>
    <!-- add newlines to keep the source tidy -->
    <br/><xsl:text>&#10;</xsl:text>
   </xsl:matching-substring>
   <xsl:non-matching-substring>
    <xsl:value-of select="."/>
   </xsl:non-matching-substring>
  </xsl:analyze-string>
  <xsl:text>&#10;</xsl:text></p>
 </xsl:for-each>
 </div>
</xsl:template>

After adding a stylesheet to centre text and add appropriate paragraph spacing, here is the result.

Licensing and distribution

I have chosen to license the completed ebook under a Creative Commons share-and-share-alike license, although this does not affect the public domain status of Coleridge’s text or Doré’s illustrations. The compiled book is available for download from the Open Library or directly from the Internet Archive. You can also download the source, excluding the images.

Last week myself and a group of friends took a winter camping trip up to the Lake District. An odd decision, it could be argued, seen as the region has recently seen both some of its worst flooding and coldest winters in recent years.  Nonethless, equipped with ice axe, crampons and a generous supply of Kendal Mint Cake we set out to climb Scafell.

Some of the things I learned

1. Elephants, though clearly signposted, are not common in the lake district. I didn’t see a single one all weekend. Sheep, however, are plentiful.
2. It may be effective as a deterrent against the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, but a towel is no replacement for an insulating mattress.
3. Pop up tents, though useful on the beach, are less effective in torrential rain and gale force winds.
4. Retracing your steps back through the snow sounds easy, and it probably is for other people.
5. The Wasdale Head Inn serves an excellent selection of whiskeys, of which Lagavulin is the best. I should know, I tried all of them.
6. Swimming in Wastwater in January is almost exactly as cold as you’d expect.

The Route

The map below, which requires Microsoft Silverlight, was exported from my GPS wristwatch and shows the route we took up Scafell before visibility made further progress a bit risky, and so we retraced our steps back through the snow. Or at least tried to before our steps mysteriously disappeared. There is also a Photosynth from part of our route available.

[silverlight: osmap.xap,520,350,show]

Swimming in Wastwater

Although as an amateur triathlete I’ve done many open water swims, I’ve never done one in winter and never without a wetsuit. So, in an attempt to kill both birds with one stone I decided to go for a swim in Wastwater in January. I lasted about two minutes. I’m no Lewis Gordon Pugh. It was cold, but it really wasn’t as bad as you might think.  The water was beautifully clear but unfortunately sharp rocks do not a beach make.

Gallery

[Show as slideshow]