My eBooks and PDFs
Some older Hiking/Travel eBooks
Diary of a Tramp (1880)
This is my first real conversion of text (from a web site) to a small eBook.
It’s late 1879 and the baking Australian summer has just started. George Ernest Morrison had decided to walk from his home in Geelong to Adelaide. By himself. His planned coastal route would be some 750 miles (1200 km). He was 17. And he kept a diary.
I first heard this fascinating true story on the radio – ABC RN’s Late Night Live – then tracked down both the scans of the 1880 diary and then the excellent transcript (text) at the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales. I taught myself how to convert such texts to an eBook, specifically the ePub format. It’s now available for free in two formats, with the ePub being the recommended. See “A note on ePubs and PDFs” (below) for further details. I should add, I’m very grateful to the Library for their permission, support and initial hard work in doing the scanning and transcription.
| Format | Link (click to download) | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| ePub | Diary of a Tramp – draft RC4 | eBook. My preferred format. Easier to read. I spent most time on this |
| Diary of a Tramp – draft RC5 | Should be readable in any PDF app/program. I did a very quick conversion of the .epub to .pdf |
I’m still learning the details of ePubs, so these are officially drafts, hence Release Candidate (RC). But they are still very usable :-). Please read the front matter for acknowledgements, references and other information, including the nature of the task; viz. not really a content edit.
A note on ePubs and PDFs
My preferred format is ePub; they are the files I actually spend most of my time on. They ‘re-flow’ when you change the font size, type, line spacing etc. So look better and are usually easier to read.
I read them on my iPad with the standard Books app. On the PC (etc), I:
- Copy the .epub file to a folder on my iCloud Drive, say ebooks
- From the iPad, I find that file via the Files app
- “Share” the .epub file, from there, to/with the Books app. You may want to use another ebook (ePub) app.
With Android and Windows just copy the .epub file to a folder/directory and open it with your preferred ePub app.
PDFs: I do a quick conversion of the ePub to PDF and make that available. They should open with any PDF reader. They are fixed format and you usually can’t change the fonts, size etc.
