The Plucker Book Repository News

Navigation issues fixed

We apologize for any recent navigation issues you might have experienced. We recently made some behind-the-scenes updates to the site code, and inadvertently made it impossible (or at least very difficult) to browse various parts of the site. Thank you for your continued patronage.

King James Bible, Poe and Goldman works restored - over 400 works total

Over the last couple of days we've gone on another restoration spree, adding the King James Version of the Bible, the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Emma Goldman's essays on anarchism. In addition, today Dave added a new work: Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay.

These additions put the total number of new and restored works available at over 400.

Adding works like wildfire

Thanks to a great script Dave wrote, we have been able to recover a bunch of works today that previously had been lost by tapping Google's cache, and prospects for retrieving many of the other works we lost are looking good. Stay tuned for more – and if you haven't been watching our Updated Works RSS Feed, now's a good time to start.

Things are shaping up

I was finally able to finish digging out the site code. You'll be able to browse around and look at things a bit. Cool, eh?

Unfortunately, we have to now recover the actual books. That is going to take a good little while. Let's see, it took us something like, oh, three or four years to get the books we had before. We might be able to work a little faster at this point, but as life pulls us in various directions, you can expect it to come more in spurts than a steady stream.

If you're itching to have a particular book made available again, please just email curtis or dave @ pluckerbooks.com. We will give priority to books we had posted previously (but won't rule out new books).

Thanks, and enjoy.

DNS issues resolved (hopefully for good!)

It has been one frustration after another. Shortly after finally getting our server up and running, we had to deal with our domain name service expiring. Because of hassles we've had previously, we have finally been able switch services.

For the record, we recommend not getting your DNS services through a company called 1dni. We are hoping our new service will work out much better.

As always, feel free to email curtis@pluckerbooks.com or dave@pluckerbooks.com for questions, comments, requests or rants.

New content; RSS feeds fixed

So, I got around to adding a few new books today and also fixing the RSS feeds so that they report new and updated books properly. Enjoy!

Back and at 'em?

Okay, so we think we have all the kinks worked out. Let us know if anything isn't working as it should.

Site fixed (we think)

Hi all – thank you for your patience with our recent site outage. We've made some significant backend changes, not the least of which is that we've moved our database from mySQL to PostgresQL. We believe that all of the issues have been resolved now, but if you find any weirdness cropping up, please let us know.

Please note that we no longer offer any statistics about our downloads. This includes the removal of download stats for individual works as well as the removal of Top 10 RSS feeds and information pages. The primary reason we took this functionality away is that our statskeeping method was flawed to begin with, and we just don't have the time to fix it.

Anyway, enjoy!

Dash problems resolved and d'Artagnan stories fixed

Some of our readers might have noticed that there was an error in our scripts involving em-dashes. Particularly, when an em-dash followed certain punctuation marks, the dash and punctuation were transposed. This issue was resolved awhile ago (stupid sed typo), but a lot of works that were processed before the problem's descovery and resolution are still affected. We are fixing works as we come across them.

That said, Dumas' d'Artagnan books (The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After, and The Vicomte de Bragelonne) have been fixed.

Tom Swift books fixed

Seems like just when we think we have things working all nice and dandy, they get screwed up somehow. We got a few reports recently that the Tom Swift titles we posted were being truncated for some reason. This has been fixed. As always, let us know if you have any trouble with any of the books here.

Back and at 'em

Hi all – sorry to all who have tried to access the site recently and couldn't reach it. It appears that our DNS service decided that they don't really have to provide the service for which we are paying them. Anyway, enjoy.

New This Side of Paradise

We've added a new version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise based on the cleaned up "11th edition" PG text.

Brothers Karamzov fixed

No, no, not like that... A kind reader had pointed out that several chapters in The Brothers Karamazov ended abruptly, and after a bit of clever sleuthing, Curtis tracked down the problem. (Okay, the sleuthing wasn't really all that clever, but you get the point.)

Anyway, enjoy!

Statistical Anomaly

Due to a small error in our stats collection scripts, what is listed as last month's stats is actually the last two months.

Even so, 5,000+ downloads a month is still fantastic!

Plucker 1.8

A new version of Plucker has been released. If you are considering upgrading, we have mirrored the viewer software here to help with bandwidth.