Wednesday 12 March 2008

New release: Full English Wikipedia TomeRaider Ebook File

We have just released the latest version of our super popular TomeRaider Wikipedia file. This baby takes 2 weeks to make and comes in at under 4gigs, so it should fit on most devices with the right card.

We are trying to publish this by Torrent, which is a first for us.

Download here:
http://www.mininova.org/tor/1237296

14 comments:

Paul said...

Awesome guys. Thanks so much for listening to our requests.

Publishing as a Torrent is a smart move too.

Paul said...

OK, now my initial enthusiasm for Torrent distribution is wearing off. This is a VERY SLOW Torrent. After over 1hr of downloading I've only got 9.2MB. The shortest ETA to completion I've seen is 5days! I'm on a relatively fast 7M/1M connection too. My share ratio is over 1.00 so I'm doing the right thing. Its the only Torrent I'm downloading / uploading.

There's only 1 seed. Presumably that's Yadabyte. However, this seed is very slow. Even the most complete peer is at only 1.5% (about 48MB).

Can you please look at increasing your seed rate or adding another seed? Once this starts to propagate, we'll get some good speeds and you can probably drop back to the single seed. It just needs the initial kick in the pants.

Paul said...

Cheers for the 2nd seed. That should help :-)

MR said...

Hi There

Yes we have it seeded from two points right now, but its slow. Sorry:(

Hopefully it will pick up as more people hear about the file:)

Thanks

Mat

Unknown said...

Downloaded the file.

Comparing with Erich Zachte's file:

Pro's

1. Much more articles,
2. The articles are up to date

Con's

1. Very important: no Categories. It is very useful feature.
2. Empty Reference sections for articles - very serious problem
3. Less designed (a lot of not formatted junk in articles)
4. Some large articles bring to permanent problems with Tomeraider (pocket pc version), which could be fixed only by hard restart.

Conclusion: Idea is great and need only some little corrections

Tony and Angi said...

I second Paul's problems - torrent distribution is great for regular torrenters and when there are sufficient seeds, and I have no problem about making it available that way - but why is it the ONLY way? I've been downloading for about 30 hours so far but the time to complete is still several days. If it was on rapidshare I'd have got the whole thing in 2-3 hours.

There's another issue too. To keep downloading it I have to make stuff available to upload. I'm on an unlimited plan, but even so, and even with a severe limit on the upload rate, over the download period I could hit problems with fair usage (I would guess uploads are more limited than downloads that way, and I can see 7 or 8 gb going up the pipe.) Overall, the torrent thing just doesn't work for me, and an alternative would be much appreciated.

Paul said...

Just for the record, in the end, it took me about 5 days on my 7Mbps/1Mbps connection.

In the end I had uploaded over 30GB (for a 10:1 ratio)!

I think Torrents can only work if supplemented by some kind of commercial seeding service rather than what seems to be a poor quality home ADSL connection.

MR said...

Yes Paul, it looks that way.

Hopefully now we have given the option to pay for the download via Amazon people will seed the torrent more:)

Thanks for being patient:)

Mat Ripley

Paul said...

Cheers for offering a commercial download alternative.

Looking at your web page it says its the May 2008 Wikipedia. So, am I correct in saying its newer than the version we downloaded by torrent?

Whilst I applaud the donation to Wiki, £2 (after the donation), seems like a lot of money for 3GB of bandwidth in the commercial hosting world.

Also, is there a fixed plan to release regular updates? Will the same £3 fee be payable for each update.

Thanks for reading (and acting on) my comments.

mitchelln said...

Is this supposed to be a complete snapshot of Wikipedia? There seems to be a lot of content missing.
For example, the Vickers Vimy article has virtually no content at all, but on Wikipedia there has been substantial content for at least 2 years.

Okay for a freebie, but I paid Tomeraider to download it.

Unknown said...

Can someone post a link for the download via Amazon? I tried searching for it but could not find it. Thanks.

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Unknown said...

Will this work on my Sony Reader touch? I am a newbie, so please be patient. Thank you. Reply to:

anx_angels@yahoo.com

jeh said...

With the ability to use 32GB SDHD cards in WM6 on a PPC, it would be nice to have a version that contains some of the images. Also would like to see an update to the latest Database as of Q4 2009 or Q1 2010.