From: Dan (dan_at_dbdigitalweb.com)
Date: Tue Feb 10 2004 - 23:07:16 PST
Hello all,
I ran across a Newton Book resource that I thought I would give a short
review of. It is called intertext.com and they publish a fiction web
magazine. It is free to download and they offer it in a variety of formats
from PDF, plain text, Palm Doc, Rocket Reader and my favorite Newton Book.
They have been publishing since 1991 and are the oldest online fiction
publishers.
The fiction ranges from plain to sci-fi and everything in-between. They
have
published 56 issues and while they use to publish quarterly it appears the
schedule has slowed down as I only see two issues in the past two years. I
have read issues 55 and 56. And while issue 56 was definitely not to my
liking, issue 55 was better and I am now reading 54.
The Newton Books are made with Bookmaker and the fonts may not be to your
preference (they seem to be the system font). You may prefer to create your
own
version of a issue by downloading the plain text and making a Newton Book
from that.. The Newton Books do have a table of contents, and do have some
basic art and layout design. It is by no means to the level of the PDF
version with its color cover art, but personally I prefer to read it on my
Newton than the PDF copy. Besides the only difference is really the cover
art (which one could add to a Newton Book if they wished). And of course it
does allow the reader to exercise their favorite choice of formats
The website has a thumbnail of each issues's cover and lists the stories
contented in that issue (after you click on the thumbnail). You can even
click on the story's link and read it in its entirety (yet another format,
HTML).
There is also listed on the site, a "best stories" link, which lists all the
best stories they have published (picked by the editor as far as I can tell)
and are only available by html links. Unless you look up the issue it was
in originally and download the Newton Book version. Of course you can
create a Newton Book from the HTML file if you just want that story, again
they have left the decision up to the reader.
The main website link currently goes to a Christmas story special and you
have to click on the archives to see the rest of the issues (normally the
default page is the archives). If you want to go directly to the Newton
Books, head to the archives, then click on a issue, then on the bottom right
under the issue you will see links for text, PDF, Postscript and other
formats. Click on the other formats to get to the Newton Book archives
(among others). Or just use this link
ftp://ftp.etext.org/pub/Zines/InterText/newton/ And you can even subscribe
where they will inform you when new issues are available.
I should mention there is on glitch in the Newton Books, the quotes look
like <<this>> rather than "this". I think it is because the plain text they
use is SeText which is slightly different than normal text and I suspect
they just dump that to the Newton Book without any extra changes other than
the graphics.
So in short I have found they have quite a wide range of fiction, some good
some bad. Perhaps take a few minutes to download a copy and see what you
think.
-Dan
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