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Cancel Cable: How Internet Pirates Get Free Stuff |
Chapter 14 – Books, Documents, and Fonts
A sampling of books and documents that you can download:
- Academic textbooks and instructors’ solutions manuals
- Comic books and anime
- Computer source code
- Course notes and reports
- Dictionaries, thesauri, references, and usage books
- Fiction and nonfiction of many periods, genres, and languages
- Foreign-language instruction
- Knitting patterns
- Magazines
- Maps, atlases, and travel guides
- Musical scores and songbooks
- Programming, computer, and technical books
- Religious texts
- Screenplays and scripts
- Tests and test-preparation guides
- Training courses, tutorials, and seminars
- WikiLeaks archives
PDF Files
The most common format for books is Portable Document Format or PDF (.pdf). PDF is a fixed page-layout format, meaning that you can’t change a PDF file’s font, text size, page size, page numbers, margins, columns, gutters, or whitespace. PDF works best for highly formatted documents like magazines, brochures, and screenplays, or typographically complex works like technical manuals, design specifications, math books, academic texts, and music, architecture, and art books.
PDFs are easy to read on large screens and tablets, but small-screened mobile devices show either an illegible miniature or a zoomed letterbox view of a partial page. Some ereaders reflow PDFs (badly).
For Windows, the most popular PDF viewer is Adobe Reader 
. Depending on who you ask, Reader either works fine or is a buggy, bloated, chronically self-updating security hazard (PDFs can carry malware). Safer and svelter alternatives include Sumatra PDF and FoxIt Reader . See also Wikipedia’s list of PDF software . If you download Adobe Reader, opt out of any accompanying crapware (such as McAfee Security Scan).
For OS X, use Apple’s built-in Preview application or Adobe Reader. (In OS X 10.2 Jaguar and earlier, Preview doesn’t support links in PDFs.)
For iOS on iPad, iPhone, and iPod, you can use Apple’s free iBooks app to read PDFs. You also can attach the PDF to an email message and send it to yourself; to read the PDF, open the message and tap the attachment. Alternatively, transfer the PDF to your device and read it by using a third-party app such as GoodReader (my favorite), AirSharing, Documents To Go, or Aji Reader. All are available from Apple’s App Store, or via Cydia for jailbreaks.
Amazon’s Kindle DX and Kindle 2 and later have a built-in PDF viewer. Send PDFs directly to your Kindle via your @kindle.com address, or drag and drop PDFs from your computer to your Kindle via a USB connection.
Dedicated ereaders such as the Sony Reader and Barnes & Noble Nook have built-in PDF readers. Most smartphones have built-in PDF readers or third-party readers such as Documents To Go.
If you download a password-protected PDF that won’t open or print, you can crack it easily with ElcomSoft’s Advanced PDF Password Recovery .
Ebook Formats
For novels and text-heavy works, avoid PDFs and look for books in EPUB (.epub), Mobipocket (.mobi), Amazon Kindle (.azw), plain text (.txt), or HTML (.html, .htm) format. Like webpages (and unlike PDF pages), ebook pages are screenfuls of text and graphics that reflow when you change the font or text size. EPUB is an open standard that all ereaders except Kindle support. Kindle supports .mobi and .azw. To convert among formats, use Calibre , an open-source, cross-platform library manager that’s better than the shovelware that comes with some ereaders. See also Wikipedia’s comparisons of ebook formats and ebook readers . If you’re looking for classics or works in the public domain, skip BitTorrent and browse Project Gutenberg’s huge library of free ebooks and audio books, which you can download in multiple formats.
Other Document Formats
A few other book and document formats:
- Rich Text Format or RTF (.rtf) is a common editable format that preserves most formatting, including fonts, styles (bold, italic, and underline), colors, text alignment, tab settings, and margins. You can open RTFs in just about any word processor. In Windows, the default RTF editor is WordPad. In OS X, it’s TextEdit.
- Microsoft Office Word (.doc, .docx), Excel (.xls, .xlsx), and PowerPoint (.ppt, .pptx) are editable document, spreadsheet, and presentation (slideshow) formats. You can open them in Office or other office suites like Apple iWork, OpenOffice.org , or LibreOffice . Microsoft also offers free converters and viewers for Office files.
- Compiled HTML Help or CHM (.chm) is a fixed format that can include text, images, hyperlinks, and a linked index and table of contents. This format was originally intended for help files but now is common for ebooks. In Windows, the default CHM viewer is HTML Help Viewer. In OS X, use Chmox or iChm . In iOS, use iChm or ReadCHM, available from the App Store or Cydia.
- DjVu (.djvu, .djv), pronounced like “déjà vu”, is a fixed format used for scanned books and documents. The DjVu website lists free browser plug-ins and desktop viewers. I use WinDjView and MacDjView.
- XML Paper Specification or XPS (.xps) is a fixed-format PDF clone from Microsoft. To view XPS files, use Word, Microsoft XPS Viewer, Internet Explorer, or a Pagemark XPS Viewer browser plug-in.
- Comic books usually come as PDFs, collections of numbered JPEG or PNG images (Chapter 12), or Comic Book Archives (.cbr, .cbz). To view archives in Windows or OS X, use Comical . In iOS, many comic-book readers are available from the App Store or Cydia. The best-reviewed is Comic Zeal. Alternatively, you can extract an archive’s separate image files by using one of the archivers listed in Chapter 5. Under the skin, comic book archives are actually RAR (.cbr) or ZIP (.cbz) files.
If you download a document file in an unfamiliar format, search fileinfo.com for the filename extension or read Wikipedia’s article about document file formats . To associate a particular document type with a specific program, see Chapter 3.
Fonts
Most fonts come as OpenType (.otf) or TrueType (.ttf) files. A surprising number of bad fonts are out there. The best ones are designed by professional typographers to look smooth onscreen and in print at any point size. OpenType fonts have extended character sets and advanced typography features used in high-end desktop publishing software. To avoid junky-looking knockoffs, get OpenType fonts from established foundries and professional type studios. See Wikipedia’s list of type foundries . To install a font file, double-click it or drag it to the Fonts system folder.