My Photoshopped version of the original cover of Mark Twain’s first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches. The original cover is pictured on page 3.

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — I took matters into my own hands when I discovered Mark Twain’s first book, long since in the public domain, is not available anywhere in electronic format. So I made my own.

My friends here have chosen as their year-long project reading all of Mark Twain’s works. First on the list is Twain’s debut book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches, published in 1867.

Remarkably, while you can buy The Complete Mark Twain Collection (more than 300 of his works!) in Amazon’s Kindle marketplace for only 99 cents (viewable on Amazon’s free Kindle app for the iPhone), it turns out that version is somewhat less than complete. The collection omits nearly half the 27 stories and essays in the original Jumping Frog book.

Though I’ve generally liked what I’ve bought from the Kindle store to read on my iPhone, I was pretty disappointed in what I bought from Amazon this time around. But let me dispense with the details necessary to my fellow Twain-reading colleagues; I’ll continue with my tale in a forthcoming post.

Instructions for the ’10 Twain St. Pete Book Club

Stanza is the leading ebook app for the iPhone and iPod Touch using the open-source ePub format.

To read the full ebook, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches, on your iPhone or iPod Touch, you’ll need the following:

• The Stanza iPhone/iPod Touch app. It’s free in the iTunes App Store (link opens in iTunes)
• The Stanza desktop app for Mac or Windows (download here)
• A WiFi network to which both your desktop computer and iPhone/iPod Touch have access. Don’t despair if this isn’t the case. Just contact me and I’ll walk you through an alternative.

Next: How to get the ebook and load it onto your iPhone/iPod Touch »