Feature: Books for free!

Kai Chandler reads up on Project Gutenberg and studies books on his palmtop.

A free lunch? There's no such thing as a free lunch. This is generally true but did you know that you can download free books from the Internet? Novels, encyclopaedias and dictionaries? Even movie information?

Thanks to the altruism of hundreds of contributors, significant numbers of books are now available for free download.

The whole thing started with Professor Michael S. Hart at Carnegie-Mellon University who was given a significant amount of computer time by an enlightened employer. He reasoned that if he could scan books in public domain then he could distribute them electronically for free.

Project Gutenberg

His initiative, called Project Gutenberg, has published over 2000 books or etexts as they call them. They are all available for free download.

Written by authors as diverse as Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle and William Shakespeare, the common factor is that most of the novels were originally published before 1923. This means they are now out of copyright.

Thanks to a worldwide team of volunteers, a new etext is published roughly every day. There's a wealth of material out there including reference books, Conan-Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, 178 works by William Shakespeare and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - so there should be something for everyone.

Project Gutenberg is at promo.net/pg/ or you could go straight to their search engine at promo.net/cgi-promo/pg/t9.cgi

Read them in the bath

The books are all in plain text - there are no images embedded in the words. This means that you can read the books using anything from the most basic editor to the most advanced word processor. A big benefit of having the books electronically is that you can use the editor's search function to search for one or more books for phrases electronically. This is ideal for students.

You could even print the material to read in the bath although the cost may be prohibitive and the ink might run. Joking aside, if you do want to print the material then Fineprint 2000 will help you save paper and ink - it's downloadable here.

Compressed books

Many of the books are compressed into the .zip format so you'll need Winzip to decompress them. If you are not sure how to download files and decompress files then it's all explained in our Computing Guide: Squeeze those files.

Tomeraider

If you don't want to be tied to your PC when reading, then have you considered using your palmtop computer to read them?

Although you can use the palmtops' built-in editor, there's a special shareware etext reader for Palm, Windows, Pocket PC and Psion platforms rather imaginatively called Tomeraider.

The benefit over using a built-in editor or database program is that Tomeraider reads files compressed into special Tomeraider format so they take up less space on the palmtop. This makes it incredibly quick to use so it's ideal for accessing reference information. You can jump almost instantaneously from one record to another, even when using a 12 megabyte database with 120,000 entries.

Interactive Movie Database

For me, the Interactive Movie Database is one of the best reasons for getting Tomeraider. This contains an extract from www.imdb.com with essential searchable details about just about every movie known to man!

Webster's Encyclopedia, and Roget's Thesaurus are also available in Tomeraider format. These, and hundreds of other etexts and databases are available for free download. A good source of etexts in Tomeraider format is www.memoware.com

Creating your own material in Tomeraider format is straightforward but requires the Windows version of Tomeraider. It would be an efficient way of producing reference material, perhaps for a sales force using palmtop computers.

To use Tomeraider you first need to download it. As shareware, Tomeraider is free to download and evaluate but costs £15 to register. Further details from www.palmtec.com and www.tomeraider.com.

 

Kai Chandler