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About Pluckerbooks

This page is a simple introduction to pluckerbooks.com, and it serves as a mini-faq about the site and content available on it. If you have any questions, please feel free to send an email to either Curtis or Dave.

What is Plucker Books?

In short, we are a website that offers stripped-down HTML versions of popular public domain literary works, suitable for viewing on handheld computing devices.

Because we love our Palm OS devices, and because the best document reader we have found for those devices is a little application called Plucker, we also provided PDB formats of all of the works on our site.

Who are you?

Most people refer to us as "The Men," but in day-to-day life we go by the humbler names of Curtis Weyant and David Maddock. We are young, aspiring web designers, sysadmins, and hackers (in the benevolent all's-fair-in-love-and-Warcraft sense) who happen to be friends as well as proponents of great books and literature.

This site is run from Dave's personal machine on a cable modem connection. The expenses are out-of-pocket, and the design, maintenance, and addition of content are all done by yours trulies.

What is Plucker?

www.plkr.org

Plucker is an awesome (the best, really) offline HTML browser for Palm OS devices, much like AvantGo—only cooler! You can develop your own "homepage" with links to various other pages or whatever you want, and then Plucker will download those pages and convert them so you can read them using the Plucker application on your Palm OS device (Dave's got a Palm IIIxe; Curtis has a Handspring Visor Deluxe). Plucker has the ability to use ZLib compression, which makes the files very small.

Plucker works great for e-books. The best way to create a Plucker database for a given book is to create separate HTML pages for each chapter and then create a table of contents page that links to those chapters.

How can I help with the Plucker project?

If you want to contribute to Plucker in anyway, please go to their website. They have several ways for you to assist, including bug submission, user testing, and even joining in on their users and development mailing lists. Assuredly, they would be very happy to hear from you and know what you're doing with their application.

What does "public domain" mean?

There are so many good texts on the web about the public domain, there's really no point in adding our amateur views on the matter. So instead, we'll just point you to what we think is the best resource: Online Books Page Frequently Asked Questions

And there's another good reference called Library Digitization Projects and Copyright.

How often do you update the site?

Well, we've been updating it a lot less lately due to our involvement in other projects. We try to do something to the site at least once a week. A lot of updating time has been spent working on the site's redesign, so not a lot of new content has been added.

Do you guys accepts contributions?

Yes. We accept many types of donations, including public domain works in HTML format (or in real dead-tree form), hardware, and money. We are planning on putting up a Plucker Books Contribution How-to sometime in the near future.

Please note that we are not a non-profit organization of any kind, so any donations you make will not be tax deductible. We're just two guys with a website and a dream.

How can I stay informed about new content added to the site?

We don't currently have any mailing lists, but we do have RSS feeds, also known as "backends". RSS is an XML format designed to easily syndicate information across websites. You can view our available backends at the backends page.

There are a lot of programs that support RSS backends. Dave uses Evolution to keep tabs on his news, and Curtis is rather fond of Feedreader.

Plucker Books is a private effort by Curtis A. Weyant and David A. Maddock to provide clean HTML versions of electronic texts, especially for viewing on handheld devices. All texts offered on this site are free for personal use.