The virtual candy store

Out of curiosity, how many of you have read entire books online? (Etexts, eBooks, whatever you want to call them.) Where? Project Gutenberg? Elsewhere? Did you read them in your web browser, or in a separate etext-reading app, or on a handheld device of some sort?

Before my mission I was an etext fiend. :) I read — no, devoured — Project Gutenberg etexts all the time, and eventually ended up making some of my own. (You can see them at Blank Slate.) Since then, I haven’t done as much with etexts as either reader or creator, so yesterday I headed over to Distributed Proofreaders (which feeds into Project Gutenberg) and proofed a few pages of an Early English Text Society book of Chaucer’s translation of Boethius into Middle English. Lots of of’s in that sentence. :) Anyway, etext creation and consumption is a passion of mine, and it’s something that just so happens to fit in perfectly with a career in librarianship. You’d almost think I planned it that way…

If you’re interested in etexts at all, swing on by to Project Gutenberg and try reading some. There are 19,000+ to choose from, so you’re bound to find something your style. As a bit of background, Project Gutenberg digitizes books that were published before 1923 (as a general rule, anything published in that year or later is still under copyright). It started back in the 70s when Michael Hart typed up the Declaration of Independence, and in the last few years it’s really started to skyrocket. There are volunteers all over the world now who work on digitizing books. It’s marvelous.

For many, reading the etexts alone isn’t enough, and they want to help out. To get a feel for what it’s like to volunteer, check out the Volunteers’ Voices page on the Project Gutenberg website. The easiest way to get started is to register on Distributed Proofreaders (which we’ll refer to as PGDP henceforth) and proof a page or two. Or ten, or a hundred, or a thousand. ;)

If you want to work on your own etext — which is what I did for The Ball and the Cross and An Icelandic Primer and a number of others — you have a few options. You can type it in by hand (I did that for The Ball and the Cross and it took 30-50 hours), scan the pages in and OCR them (which is what I did for An Icelandic Primer, though the scans were already available online), or find existing texts and prepare them for Project Gutenberg (which is what I did for the L.M. Montgomery etexts). The benefit of the latter is that if the original site goes down, the text is still available. (Project Gutenberg won’t be going down anytime soon — there are mirrors all over the world.) Before you start, though, check David Price’s In-Progress List to make sure nobody else is working on it. If somebody has already gotten clearance but it’s been a year or two or three, you can probably take over, as long as you get permission.

You know, I love Project Gutenberg even more now that I’m “publishing” books (Riverglen Press), because I have 19,000+ to choose from. It’s like Christmas and a candy store all rolled into one. :)

The main reason I don’t read e-books is because I can’t easily mark them up, cross reference, fold pages, and highlight the spit outta them. I underline and mark all of my books, and now, I extract all the good parts I want to reference later and put them in Quoty. :)

Are there any e-text readers that let you mark or highlight, and save that document w/ your annotations?

Sitting in front of a computer scrolling through pages just isn’t the same as curling up with a real book. It looses some of its charm. :(

Connor: True, you do lose the ability to make notes in the margins. And I think that’s important — I myself became a writer-in-books not too many months ago.

I haven’t looked into many etext readers — I just use Writeroom on the Mac, which is basically a plaintext fullscreen text editor — but I’d bet there are some. But then again, maybe not. An online etext reader would be interesting, especially if you let people share annotations. Kind of like a library copy where you can write in it. Hmm.

Speaking of Quoty, I popped on over there thirty seconds ago and came across a quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (posted by Richard Miller) which I absolutely loved:

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

Laura: I heartily agree. Books are always better. Or at least better for reading; for searching, etexts usually trump flipping through pages.

I suppose one of the primary reasons to read an etext is if you can’t get hold of the book any other way; for example, neither BYU Library nor Provo Library has David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus, so I’m reading the Project Gutenberg etext. But I suppose I could always get it through interlibrary loan…

There’s another reason which doesn’t quite apply to most of us: namely, people in third world countries often can’t get access to real books. Etexts are the only way for them to get at this literature.

For me, though, I’m so addicted to reading that I’m pleased as punch to be able to do it on my computer as well as with a real book. :)