It has been some time now since Lawrence Lessig released Code 2.0, the second edition to his book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. I have not yet read the book, however. Why not? Because it was not available in a suitable format.

The books is available from its website as a free PDF download. Unfortunately, PDF is a format designed to do one thing: lay things out to print. I do not want to print the book (if I wanted that, I would just buy a hard copy!) No, I want to read it on my a screen. In this case, the screen on my phone (an n900 running fbreader). PDFs are laid out as a sequence of pages, sized for print. Any screen that is not at least the size of these pages ends up panning and scrolling in horrible ways. PDF readers also lack the sorts of features one wants out of an “ebook” (such as being able to automatically resume from where one left off).

Converting the PDF to a sensible format has proved to be very difficult, if not impossible, without a huge amount of manual work. Not worth it. Lessig, however, also hosts a copy of the book contents in a wiki. So, today I finally got around to writing a script to screen scrape the wiki for content, and then massaged it a bit for ideal eBook experience.

So, for anyone who wants it, I release here an eBook-friendly (X)HTML version of the book, licensed (as the source) under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license. Download the eBook