Doc Savage 182 - 190 Reloaded

I am working on new formats of the "new" Doc Savage novels published by Bantam Books starting in the late 1970's:

- "The Red Spider", Lester Dent's "lost" novel
- "Escape From Loki", Philip Jose Farmer's "prequel" to the Doc Savage stories
- Seven new stories written by Will Murray


All of these books have been out of print for years, and have only been available as used books that have not always been easy to find, and as scans posted online by someone calling themselves "Stealthstalker" (who I will refer to hereafter as "Ss" because I don't like to type that much).

Ss did a service to Fans of Doc by scanning these books and converting them to digital form. But then he did a horrible disservice (in my opinion) by using "enhanced text" when he converted them to Microsoft Word and HTML.

This included:

- Any word that was a color (like "bronze") was displayed in that color.
- Other words were also "enhanced" with color, such as "icy" and "colder" displayed in blue.
- "Action" words were enclosed in brackets, like <click> and <blink>.
- Numbers were sometimes given in both words and numerals, like "three(3)".
- Words were highlighted in bold, italics and underlined apparently because Ss thought they should be.
- And worst of all, Ss inserted comments to "explain" things that he felt the reader needed to know, or to recommend other books in the series when something "in the past" was referred to. For example, In fact, it had accomplished that feat in the past [read "The Polar Treasure (#004)].


My personal opinion is that all of this detracted from the stories, rather than "enhancing" them. So this is my first pass at reformatting them. What I am doing is removing all the special formatting; adding some very basic HTML markup (like chapter headings); and correcting spelling and other scan and OCR errors when I notice them.

I am not doing a full proofreading, and I have not even read the books yet. I've been waiting until this conversion was done. I'll make additional corrections as I read them and post new versions. But I wanted to put this out now, so that I can get some feedback from the Doc Savage Community.


Ultimately I want to get copies of the books and do an actual proofing of the books so that they are as accurate as possible. But I really hope that Bantam (or someone else) will put out e-book versions of them before I have a chance to do that, LOL. I have ordered used copies of The Red Spider, Python Isle and White Eyes so that I can start on the proofing.


This zip file contains three files (aside from the one you are reading):

- The original scanned and enhanced Ss version of Python Isle in HTML format
- My conversion of Python Isle in mobi format for kindle
- My conversion of Python Isle in epub format for Nook and other readers

Im using the best cover images I can find in my conversions. While I was looking for the cover for this book, I found Lester Dents outline for Python Isle, and have included it at the end of the book.


I would appreciate feedback on my project. I am going to complete the conversion of all nine books for my own use. But I would like to hear from people whether they like what Ive done so far, and whether I should post my final conversions as I complete them.

I am posting this to the alt.binaries.e-book Usenet newsgroup. Please post your comments there.

Nomad
