Convert Text Files into iPod Books 
Convert the many readily available text files on the Web into readable iPod notes.
Since there aren’t a ton of books out there to read on your iPod, if you want more choice you will have to get down and dirty and convert some text files yourself. Finding source material isn’t hard; check out Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.net)for thousands of free books.
Getting the Files onto Your iPod
For the purposes of this hack, I’ve decided to go with one of my favorite authors, James Joyce. Rather than overload my iPod with something as grandiose as Ulysses, I’ve decided to download the much shorter collection of short stories, Dubliners (available from Project Gutenberg at (http://www.gutenberg.net/text01/dblnr11.txt), as shown in Figure 3-14. Feel free to choose another text to walk through these steps with me, although if you haven’t read Dubliners, I highly recommend it.
Figure 3-14. Project Gutenberg etext of Dubliners, by James Joyce
After saving this file to my local drive, I need a way to convert it into something that the iPod can handle. The iPod can read any plain-text file put in its Notes folder, as long as the file isn’t greater than 4 KB in size. Any text in the file over the 4-KB limit will be cut. As dblnr11.txt weighs in at 388 KB, a ...
Get iPod and iTunes Hacks now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
