Chrome extension: Blacker Text

Web design has opted for dark grays as opposed to blacks. For a middle-aged person like me, this makes things less pleasant (and perhaps harder, but I don't have the empirical data to show that) to read: the grays not only look dimmer, but also fuzzier to me. So I wrote a simple Chrome extension that automatically snaps near-black colors to black (and near-white to white, for use on dark-mode sites) on all websites, except within links. You can adjust how close you have to be to black (or white) to snap. 

Update: Here is the FireFox version.

The result of using this extension for the last week has been a pleasanter web experience: a lot of sites look crisper, more like reading a book printed with high quality ink on high quality acid-free paper. I miss it on my phone since mobile Chrome doesn't support extensions (I am tempted to switch to a mobile browser that does support extensions, but haven't done so yet).

Eventually, if there is any actual interest in the extension from people other than myself, I may add some per-site options in case some site is broken by this. 

Contrast, Serif and Justify

I was trying to read Locke online, but was annoyed by the fact that the font was dark gray instead of black and sans serif, neither of which is great for extended reading. So I made two bookmarklets: Contrast and Serif. Just drag them to your bookmark bar and click on them to run them on a page. The Contrast one snaps all fonts to white or black (depending on background color) or blue (if it's a link) and adjusts near-black/white page backgrounds to black/white.

Update 1: Justify may also help. And, finally, Reader combines all three functions.

Update 2: Sepia is sometimes nice.

Update 3: See also my Blacker Text extension.

Setting a very low security expiry date on a pdf

Sometimes one wants someone (even oneself) to have a PDF that becomes unviewable past a certain date, but the expiry isn't meant to be secure--perhaps one is sharing a manuscript between friends but one doesn't want one's friend to access an out of date version.

Here's a simple way that works with Adobe's Acrobat Reader and maybe some other readers (but not all others--e.g., Sumatra ignores the expiry entirely), based on combining two ideas I found online. It only works on PDFs that haven't already been compressed or encrypted. Load the PDF into a text editor. Find the code /Type /Catalog. Insert this bit of code right after that code, changing the date to match your needs:

/Type /Catalog
/Names <<
    /JavaScript <<
      /Names [
        (EmbeddedJS)
        <<
          /S /JavaScript
          /JS (
var rightNow = new Date();
var endDate = new Date(2018, 7, 10); // expiry date: year, month (0=Jan, 11=Dec), day
if(rightNow.getTime() > endDate)
{
app.alert("This document has expired.");
this.closeDoc();
}
          )
        >>
      ]
    >>
  >>

Then load it into Acrobat Reader. Acrobat Reader should display it, but when you exit it will ask to save the file. Agree, as this will hide the above code and make it no longer easy to edit.

Whitaker's Words for Kindle

My wife asked me to get a Latin dictionary for my daughter's Kindle, so I dusted off the source files for my PalmOS Whitaker's Words dictionary, modified them a little and generated this dictionary. Enjoy!

Kindle version of One Body discounted to $26

My apologies for more advertising. While I was happy to notice earlier in the week that the Kindle version of my One Body book was out, I was disappointed by its high price (I have nothing to do with setting the price). But it looks like it's now discounted to $26.

One Body, now for Kindle

Finally my One Body book has a Kindle version!

Moon+ ebook reader for Android

In the summer, I tested ten ebook reader apps for Android, looking for something that worked well with large documents. My best choices were Moon+ and Mantano, but neither was ideal. Moon+ took 20 seconds to open the Summa epub, though it searched it in a speedy 20 seconds, and Mantano opened it almost instantly, though it took 80 seconds to search.

The Moon+ developer has just pointed me to his latest apk of Moon+ which improves the Moon+ loading speed significantly It can now load the Summa in 10 seconds on my Archos 43, and probably faster on faster devices. The search seems to be slightly slowed down, to about 23 seconds, but that's still quite decent. Moon+ is now clearly the best reader for large documents if you want searching, and is all-around an excellent reader. So I think I'm close to the point where I can start converting my large library from Plucker to epub.

I've accordingly updated my mini-reviews of epub readers.

Further update: On my new Epic 4G Touch (the Sprint version of the Galaxy S2, though a bit slower), it takes 4 seconds for the latest Moon+ to open the Summa, and 25 to search.

Software problems with Kindle Fire as ebook reader

We've acquired a Kindle Fire. I've been trying it out. I like the screen. The size is slightly too large to be comfortable in a front pants pocket, but I could imagine keeping it there. I think it's a pretty nice tablet. Web browsing speed is decent. Video playing is good. Scrolling through moon maps works well. But it is a Kindle, after all, so one would expect its core functionality would be reading Kindle books. And that doesn't work so well. Here are a few problems, though maybe I just haven't figured things out. The good news is that all of these are software issues and hence Amazon can fix them if they want to. Moreover, third-party ebook reader apps will fix some of these, but they won't read the Kindle books.

1. No global search. One of the cool things about the eink Kindles is supposed to be indexed global text searching, so you can search through all your books at once, fast. No such thing. There is a search button when you go to Books, but it just searches titles and authors (and maybe some other meta-data). It doesn't look inside books. (And, yes, it's had plenty of time to index at least the dictionary that's there.

2. Super slow search within a book. Searching is the big advantage of an ebook reader over physical books. Without searching, an ebook reader is mainly a matter of convenience. With searching you can do new and intellectually useful things with your books. The eink Kindles (I am now tempted to say "real Kindles") index books and have super-fast searching within them. While the Fire does search within a book, it's super slow. For instance, I did my usual benchmark search for "junk" in my Kindle version of Aquinas's Summa. For comparison, on my aging Palm TX with Plucker, the search takes about 45 seconds. On the Fire it took about 4 minutes 35 seconds. The Fire is on a dual-core 1GHz device. The Palm TX is a 300MHz device, and the search is not index-accelerated. Without indexing, a decent developer should be able to get under a 30 second search time, and with indexing it should be instant.

3. Inconvenient installation of books not from Amazon. I tried to download my etext of the Summa from the Internet. It's in the proper .mobi format. Amazon's web browser duly saved it but did not recognize the .mobi extension, and offered to open it in QuickOffice rather than the Kindle reader. To open it in the Kindle reader, I had to move it to the Books folder. One could do that with a file manager app (I don't think one is included), but I just did it via a USB connection to a laptop. Then it opened fine. But why doesn't the Kindle's browser recognize Kindle files?

4. The minimum screen backlight level is set too bright, making reading in a dark room not quite as comfortable as it could, and also not so great for astronomy. To give Amazon credit, it's not much too high, and it's a problem on most Android devices. This is a software problem--the hardware is quite capable of lower backlight levels. Fortunately, I'm almost finished a (non-free) app that fix this issue.  (I speculate that this is done in order to avoid customer service headaches from users who set their brightness too low and then don't know how to set it back.)  I love ebook reading with a backlit display, but I like the backlight to be dim.  Update: The 6.3 update greatly improves the minimum backlight level.

5. Text rendering in the Kindle ebook viewer app leaves colorful shadows around letters in portrait, reverse portrait and reverse landscape mode. (The same problem occurs in the regular Kindle app for other Android devices.) The problem doesn't seem to occur in other apps on the Fire. There are anecdotal reports of eyestrain, but I don't know if they are related. The cause of the issue is that for better text quality, Amazon enabled subpixel rendering in the ebook viewer. Subpixel rendering uses the red, green and blue rectangles that each pixel is striped into to increase the effective screen resolution.  But to do that, you need to know how the red, green and blue rectangles are arranged, and you need to change your rendering when the screen is rotated by the user.  Otherwise, you get colorful shadows, and you'd be much better off using gray-scale antialiasing.

However, the ebook reader app does subpixel rendering on the assumption of horizontal RGB ordering no matter how the screen is turned.  While the shadows are visible to the naked eye, I verified them under a microscope.  See the photos on the side (the slanted line is the pointer in the eyepiece).  Their assumption of horizontal RGB striping produces beautiful results in regular landscape mode (landscape with power button on right) where the assumption is correct.  Notice how nice the Landscape letters look with no color shadows.  But in all other modes, the results are terrible.  The worst of all is reversed landscape (landscape with power button on left): you can see a nasty red shadow on the left of the long vertical of the "h" and a nasty blue shadow on the right.  Portrait and reversed portrait aren't quite so terrible, but are pretty bad (and I think especially bad if you turn on night mode and look at white text on a black background).  You can see that the portrait and reversed portrait "h" has the red and green subpixels turned on and the blue subpixels muted on the left of the long vertical stroke, which results in an orange shadow.  This works perfectly in the landscape "h" where the darkened blue subpixel merges visually into the vertical and the red and green ones merge into the white beside it, and that was the assumption on which the font renderer was working.

Points 3, 4 and 5 are all easy fixes if Amazon only wants to.  The subpixel bug can be fixed by just turning off subpixel rendering--less than a minute's work for their developer.  The text will still be of great quality, as one can see in other apps.  The inconvenient sideloading of books is an easy fix, ten minutes' work for a developer, but I can see that Amazon might have commercial reasons for not doing it.  The minimum brightness is another minute's work for their developer.  A good search would take a bit longer.  I'm guessing about 15 hours of developer time to get a polished and fully debugged good search.  The cost of all of this would be miniscule to Amazon.

Actuality, Possibility and Worlds, and Principle of Sufficient Reason for Kindle

I just noticed that my Actuality, Possibility and Worlds book is available for Kindle for under $18. I actually didn't even know (or at least remember) it was available for Kindle.

Update: And The Principle of Sufficient Reason is available for about the same price, too.

Hyperlinked Summa Theologica for Kindle

A colleague told me that the Summa Theologica files he found for the Kindle weren't great. So here is mine. It's in Mobipocket format. (I already posted the epub one.)

epub Summa Theologica

Here is my epub version of Aquinas's Summa Theologica.
[Edit: Fixed bad link.]

My search for an Android ebook reader

[Edit: I edited the Moon+ review to take into account the latest version as of January 5, 2012. -ARP]

Every couple of weeks, my Palm TX stops working, and the only way to get it working again is to short out its battery quickly in order to clear out the RAM (disconnecting the battery would work, too, but then I'd have to unsolder it and resolder it; hmm, maybe I could solder in a tiny switch?).  So I need a new home for my large ebook collection.  It looks like the current options are iOS and Android.  But iOS development requires a Mac, plus iOS is notoriously closed.  So Android.

I acquired an Archos 43.  I don't particularly recommend the device, but it has the advantage for me of not being a phone (so I don't have to switch from my grandfathered-in phone plan that gives me unlimited Internet on my Treo at a ridiculously low rate), plus a manufacturer who has a very open attitude.  A happy thing: PDF readers for Android are an order of magnitude better than PalmPDF (though PalmPDF was a great step forward from Adobe's reader for Palm), and the higher resolution screen is quite helpful.

But what about non-PDF ebooks?  It looks like the standard format of the future is epub.  So I converted my Plucker version of Aquinas's Summa Theologica to html.  This generated 626 html files (about one per article), total size 25 mb.  These html files use very simple formatting, which should make them easily convertible.  I then converted the html to epub with Calibre.  Options: 260K segments, don't split on page breaks.  Result: a 6.9mb epub file (the Plucker file was 5.6mb).  This is quite large as epubs go, since most epubs are novel-length, rather than Summa-length.

What would I like in an ebook reader?

1. Speed (I don't want to wait 30 seconds to open the Summa at a conference to look something up prior to asking a question). 
2. Good searching at a decent speed through large texts.
3. Multiple bookmarks/annotations.  
4. Good use of a small screen.
5. Scrolling rather than paging (this is a taste preference, but I think paging is a left-over from dead-tree technology;  why should one have to flip back and forth to see a difficult passage that is broken between pages--one should just be able to scroll to locate the passage conveniently).
6. Open source.

Item (1) and (2) are essential.  Item (3) is close to essential, but I find I don't use Plucker's bookmarks/annotations quite as much as I thought I would.

I tried: Moon+, FBReader, CoolReader, Aldiko, the Nook app, StarBooks, Foliant Beta, Mantano Trial and the Kindle app.  FBReaderJ and CoolReader are open source.  I don't know about Foliant and StarBooks.  The others are closed source.  All are free or have free or trial versions which is what I tested.

Summary: None of the readers was 100% satisfactory for my purposes.  Moon+ and Mantano are the best choices.  Moreover, both have very responsive developers who are interested in working with me on large text issues.  If you care more about searching than opening large documents very quickly, Moon+ is the choice.  If you care more about opening large documents very quickly, Mantano is the choice.  But this may change with future versions.

My main tests were just opening the Summa and searching through it for the nonsense word "trubbli".  As background for the speed tests, the Summa opens in two or three seconds in Plucker on my PalmTX, which is underclocked to 208mhz, and a search through the Summa takes 41 seconds.

The Archos has a 1000mhz CPU.  The epub format is basically zipped html files, each at most 260K long, with some additional meta-data.  It should be possible to extract a single file from an epub zip just about instantly, to open an epub file it shouldn't be necessary to do more than open some meta-data files and then load the correct html segment.  It takes the Archos 0.05seconds to unzip a 200K file (unrepresentatively large) from my summa2.epub file using busybox's unzip.  Unzipping all of the files in the Summa takes 17 seconds on the device, and then searching them with grep takes less than two seconds.

Moon+: This was the first reader I tried, after hearing really good things about it. This mini-review is edited as of January 5, 2012, and is of the version downloaded from the developer's site. It takes 10 seconds to load the document. That is slightly disappointing--I thought it would be like Plucker, namely almost instant.  Display options are great, scrolling is great.  I haven't tried the annotation features, but I've been told they're good.  Search took about 22 seconds, which is close to the best that one can expect given how long unzipping the epub takes.
The developer is great and responsive. For instance, the version I tried in the summer took an unacceptable 20 seconds to open the document, and the developer has worked on reducing this. Moreover, the summer's release had an annoying dialog each time you clicked on an intra-document link, but it's now gone.

Apart from the imperfect 10 second load time, Moon+ is great. You can scroll, you have a ton of display options, etc. It is the best choice right now for large ebooks as far as I can tell. And the 10 second load time is decent given some of the competition.

FBReader: This is open source, which means a lot to me as I don't expect any reader to have all the features I want, and so I expect to have to add features myself.  It took about 40 seconds to load the document, which is unacceptable.  Search time was a creditable 20 seconds.  Since the opening time was utterly unacceptable, further tests were unnecessary.

Coolreader: Another open source offering.  Took a minute to load.  Took three seconds to flip a page.  I couldn't click on any of the links.  Didn't try any more as it was not usable.

Aldiko: A pretty popular closed-source reader.  It loaded the file instantly, thereby showing that there is nothing intrinsic to the epub file structure that makes that impossible.  But the search was unacceptably slow at  about 74 seconds.  Moreover, it pages rather than scrolls, which is annoying.  I didn't try any more as the search speed killed it as an option.

Nook: Annoyingly, it wants epubs in its own directory, and doesn't let you browse the file system to get to them, like other readers let you.  It also loaded the file instantly.  However, it had really annoying large margins, showing too little text per screen.  Maybe it's optimized for larger screens (the Archos has a 4.3" screen), but such large margins should be adjustable in the app, and I couldn't find an adjustment for them.  The deal-killer was the search.  After two minutes it wasn't done, and I gave up and uninstalled it.

Starbooks: After about 20 seconds of first-time importing, it loads instantly.  Page-based model.  But no search!  So, that's that.

Foliant Beta: It took a while to scan the Summa, but it cached the scan, so next time it started instantly.  Developers whose model requires the epub to be all scanned (which I am guessing is what is behind the unacceptable startup times on otherwise good apps, such as Moon+ and FBReader) should take note.  Search speed was marginal at 35 seconds, too, and it scrolled fine.  The killer was that I couldn't click on intra-document links, and I couldn't change the absurdly large font size.  The inability to click on links makes books like the Summa which seem to have been written with hyperlinks in mind (wasn't St Thomas ahead of his time?) unusable.  However, it is a beta version, so it may improve.

Mantano: Starts the Summa instantly.  Unfortunately, like many readers, it's page based rather than allowing for continuous scrolling (why pages? most page breaks are an accidental division with no semantic value).  And as with a number of other readers that started the book instantly, searching the Summa was slow, about 80 seconds.  I was using the free seven day trial.  Unlike the other apps, Mantano has no permanent free version.  However, Mantano has an extremely responsive development team that collects suggestions, and it looks like they are quite interested in working on these issues.

Kindle: Unlike the other apps, this doesn't have epub support as far as I know.  Fortunately, Calibre can convert to Mobipocket format, too, so I put a Mobipocket conversion of the Summa, based on the same html files, in the Kindle directory (like some of the other apps, it only reads books in a special directory; my beloved Plucker on PalmOS does that, so I don't complain too much).  It opened in a second or less.  However, it is page-based, with no scrolling.  More seriously, the search.  The good news is that unlike most other apps, it has a progress bar for the search.  The other apps mostly just show you a spinner and so you don't know what percentage has been searched.  The bad news is that I started the search around the time I started writing this paragraph, and it's still going.  It's now about 3/4 done, and my timer says that it took 4 minutes to get there.  It's definitely one of the slower searchers.  Since Kindle is the big name in ebooks, I'm going to let the time get to the end.  Almost there.  Finally: "0 results for 'trubbli'."  I missed the exact time of finishing, but it was around 6 minutes.  Wow!  How did they manage it to be so slow? There is also a subpixel rendering bug, at least as January 5, 2012.

Conclusions: I have yet to find anything that works as well for my purposes as Plucker on my 5+ year old Palm TX, though the faster search speed of Moon+ almost compensates for the slower document opening speed.  Perhaps I should try readers that use other formats than epub, like Mobi.  Or perhaps I should just take Coolreader or FBReader and bang on the source until it does what I want it to do.  Or perhaps I should just wait until something comes along that is compelling better than Plucker on Palm.

Or maybe I should just keep on downloading epub apps.  I'll post comments with test results on other epub readers or update the post.

PDF Viewer for Android

I acquired an Android device, but haven't been too happy with any of the free PDF viewers I tried for ebook reading. E.g., some don't keep your place in the document when you exit. Anyway, the closest I found was the APV project, and it being open source, I joined and added most of the features I wanted. In case anybody else wants an acceptable and free PDF Viewer for Android, a pre-release version with a whole bunch of enhancements by me is here. Send me bug reports.

Library of Historical Apologetics

This looks like an amazing resource, coordinated by Tim McGrew. Here is what they say about themselves:

At the Library of Historical Apologetics, our mission is to be the world’s leading resource for lay apologists, pastors, students, and scholars seeking historical apologetics materials for self-study, church classes, sermon preparation, and research. Our digital collection currently contains references to about 3,000 items with a focus on works in English from the 17th through the early 20th centuries.

Beyond simply providing access to these materials, our long-term vision is to create a digital learning environment that incorporates personal and collaborative reading, note taking, and study tools. We want to support a community in which more experienced scholars help newcomers find the material they need and construct secondary resources such as curricula, study guides, and course syllabi that can be shared by all users.

This project is directed by Dr. Timothy McGrew, who is Professor of Philosophy at Western Michigan University, where he has taught since 1995, serving as department chairman from 2005-2009. The Institute for Digital Christian Heritage is providing technical and administrative assistance in the form of project planning, implementation and evaluation.

Text to speech

I've decided to step beyond the limits of the audio books available at librivox by using text to speech to generate audio books from Project Gutenberg files. I'm currently using the Ivona Amy voice, which is a lovely British voice, but I may use Brian, too (for free 30 day trials, download their Ivona Reader). My initial conversions of the text files to ogg were with Expressivo, but my plan is to do the rest of the conversions with a perl script that calls the Windows SAPI interface for the voices. You can get the script here (which I hereby release under the FreeBSD license). It can be used as follows: perl txt2ogg --voice=amy InputFile.txt (this assumes you have no other voice with "amy" in it; if you do, you may need to include more text--the voice=... option takes a perl regular expression). If you want to pre-listen to the voice, do: perl txt2ogg --voice=amy --outloud InputFile.txt. Interrupt with ctrl-c.

What has it got in its pocketses?

Most of the time when I'm out of the house, I have in my pocket a copy of the Summa Theologiae (English), the Opera Omnia of St. Thomas Aquinas (Latin), the complete works of John Henry Newman, all of Plato (Hamilton and Cairnes) and Aristotle (Barnes), Wittgenstein's Collected Works, the Church Councils up to Vatican II, Descartes' Meditations (Latin, French and English), Spinoza's Ethics (English), St. Anselm's Cur Deus Homo (English), seven volumes of Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers (English), the Gerhardt edition of Leibniz (French and Latin), 49 volumes of Harvard Classics, the Jesuit Relations, Hume's Dialogues, Enquiry and Treatise, several texts by John Paul II and Benedict XVI, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, the Matthew and Mark portions of the Catena Aurea, Darwin's Descent and Origin, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Pascal's Pensees (French), Malebranche's Dialogues (English), Dal's Russian Dictionary, a 17th and a 19th century French-French dictionary, a Latin-English lexicon, a dictionary based on WordNet 3.0, the 1913 Webster's, Strong's lexicon, the Old Testament (Hebrew, Greek, Latin, JPS, RSV and KJV), the New Testament (Greek, Syriac, Latin, RSV and KJV), the Liturgy of the Hours, a bunch of fun science fiction, the stories of Saki, some children's literature to read to my daughter, typically part of an audio book (mainly from librivox) that I listen to while exercising or doing dishes, and various other items (including an out-of-date copy of my own website so I can refer to my own papers).

At conferences and in academic discussions, I typically have most of the primary texts that interest me right in my pocket, most of them in searchable form. It can be rather fun to pull out an apposite text from a primary source and quote at a conference. Granted, some of the translations are dated, and some of the texts are not the latest editions, but they are all very much usable.

Technical note: I keep all the texts, except the ones that are only temporary, on one 1gb SD card (they now can be had for less than $10) inside my Palm TX PDA. The Biblical texts are free, using the PalmBible+ format. The other texts are all in Plucker format (the latest and most reliable PalmOS version is here). The Biblical and Plucker texts I tend to view using a smooth and readable Utopia 16 font. The dictionaries are mostly home made and in RoadLingua format (RoadLingua is shareware; PalmBible+ and Plucker are free and open source). The Wittgenstein, Plato, Aristotle and Kierkegaard texts are authorized home-made conversions from rather expensive Past Masters databases. The Catholic Encyclopedia text is online, but I got it from the New Advent CD-ROM. The other texts cost me nothing, except for time. The Plucker ones are typically conversions from the web (using Plucker Desktop, Sunrise, JPluck or SunriseXP). There one needs to be careful of copyright. In cases where there is little added creativity in the html file over and beyond an original public domain file, I do not worry about copyright. In some cases, I write the web site administrator for permission to convert the texts for personal and/or scholarly purposes, and I almost always get the permission. In some cases, I only download files temporarily for the purposes of reading them and delete them afterwards, assuming (whether correctly or not only a court can tell) that this is sufficiently similar to the use of a VCR to constitute fair use. Some web site administrators, very conveniently, give clear and permissive terms for use of their texts and I am grateful to them. Worrying about the copyright issue is a nuisance.

I am kind of surprised that I know no other philosopher to carry a lot of ebooks on a portable device. I don't quite know exactly why. Granted, some of the texts took significant effort to convert, but a lot of them were very easy to do, there are a lot of pre-converted texts available in a variety of formats, and academics anyway do put in significant effort buying books, etc. The four NLX commercial texts were quite expensive (but then for the price I also got some very nicely searchable PC versions), but the other texts were cheap (Catholic Encyclopedia) or free (the rest). There is an investment in the hardware (in my case, the Palm TX), but the cost of the hardware is equal to the price of 5-10 books, and if one can get the books for free, it will pay for the hardware. I know some folks don't like to read texts in electronic formats, despite advantages such as convenient dictionaries, searching, hyperlinking, bookmarking and notetaking. The fact that less text fits on the TX's screen than on a printed page is a nuisance. But one gets used to it (I do most of my fun reading on the TX), and for quick reference one can easily tolerate it.

Church Fathers and Summa Theologica eBooks

Not long ago, I prepared for myself a Plucker eBook of the Church Fathers, based on the great collection at New Advent. With permission of Kevin Knight who runs New Admin (thank you!), I have now posted the ebook here. It's 32mb.

I also posted a Plucker eBook of St Thomas's Summa Theologica at the same location.

The Plucker format can be read on most modern PDAs (PalmOS, PPC or Linux), computers (Windows XP, Mac OS X or Linux) and the IRex iLiad, and the ebook download page includes information on how to get reading software for your device.

I like the idea of having the Church Fathers with me always on my Palm TX. Right now I'm reading St. Irenaeus. [edited]

Biblia Clerus

The Holy See's Congregation for the Clergy has a (new?) website that looks really useful: Biblia Clerus, a set of online resources (also downloadable) that includes Scripture with linked Patristic commentary, as well as conciliar documents, Denzinger, papal writings, the Code of Canon Law, and lots of other useful materials.

Eifelheim

I recently read, and very much enjoyed, Eifelheim (can be bought from amazon, or downloaded for free in pdf format from the author's literary agency), Michael Flynn's novel of aliens landing outside a Black Forest village in the 14th century. The best parts--from my point of view--of the novel were the interactions between the village's pastor, a man of formidable Parisian education (yes, this might seem unlikely, but there is a story there) and a friend of Ockham, and the aliens. Flynn captures cutting-edge 14th century scientific and philosophical thinking with great sympathy and surprising fidelity, and shows how a smart 14th century scholastic with Ockhamist tendencies would interact with 21st (or later) century science. We see the flexibility of scholastic categories, a flexibility that is going to be of interest to those of us still interested in a reconciliation between contemporary science and scholastic metaphysics.

I did not expect to read a novel that alludes to an Ockhamist argument against the possibility of nested accidents. (This is in support of an argument that the pastor gives against light having a velocity. The idea is that light is an accident of fire, so if light had a velocity, that velocity would be an accident of an accident, which is impossible.)

The medieval and alien characters are well-drawn and develop over the course of the novel. I was somewhat less happy with the portions set in the 21st century, but they were relatively briefer (and they may have been written first). All in all, quite an excellent piece of science fiction.

Free philosophy ebooks

Yesterday, I came across a link to wowio. They have a catalogue of free ebooks, including ones from major publishers. The ebooks are in PDF format, and come with an advertising page at the beginning and end. You can download three a day. Their philosophy catalog includes a handful of good OUP titles, by authors like Thomas Nagel, Terence Irwin, Philip Kitcher and Roy Sorensen. They also have Aquinas' De Malo. Other goodies, outside the philosophy section, include Hawking's The Theory of Everything. A good way to get to good books is to go to different subject areas, and then choose "Oxford University Press" as the publisher.