This is my implementation of @FManga’s idea of creating executable books for Pokitto:
My goal was to make a simple and portable plain text reader that would allow books to be read on any device, of course including Pokitto, so it only has very basic functionality – monochrome, fixed-width font (allows to preserve ASCII art, tables etc.) without antialiasing. Bookmark can be saved with C button.
source:
As always, everything is CC0, public domain.
And here are some compiled books, either public domain or under a free license (I’ll be adding more):
I’ve added some more books, it’s very fun to search for these interesting old writings (unfortunately only fraction of which have been digitized into text formats). If anyone wants to reuse the text files I have formatted and used to make the PD books here, e.g. for testing and developing different readers, they can be found in my repository here:
I take the texts from Gutenberg and Wikisource, but they require further reformatting, because:
Gutenberg’s license needs to be stripped (in order for the text to be in PD, and also because of size).
Gutenberg’s plain text format breaks lines in middle of paragraphs and have other undesirable formatting.
Things such as ASCII art images need to be deleted and created from scratch in order to remove Gutenberg’s possible copyrestriction.
Also not all books from Gutenberg may be safe to use, especially outside the US. I take only books published before 1920 (preferably before 1900) whose author died at least 70 (preferably 100) years ago, which should be PD in most parts of the world.
