For books are more than books,
they are the life
The very heart and core of ages past,
The reason why men lived and worked and died,
The essence and quintessence of their lives.
--Amy Lowell
Not many people would read a novel online. For that matter, few would
want to read an entire book on any subject on a computer screen. Why
then, you might wonder, are more and more books coming online? All of
the "Great Books" including the classics from ancient Greece
and Rome plus the major works from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
through the 19th century are now available on the World Wide Web.
Are these great works on the Internet simply to prove that the
Internet has content worth reading? That may seem to be the case for
those who have no interest in reading the classics; but then the same
thing might be said of the dust that the Great Books collect in libraries.
One reason for these works making it to the World Wide Web has been
due to the fact that they're no longer restricted by copyright. Put
another way: many more books--those written since 1930--would now be
online if they weren't under a 70-year copyright protection.
As one might expect, lots of booksellers now do business online, with
Amazon and Barnes & Noble leading the pack. Amazon has caught on
to an idea that a Syrian friend who owned a bookshop in Kuwait
understood at least 25 years ago.
Every time a film came to Kuwait that was based on a book, my friend
would order many more copies of the book than he would ordinarily. He
knew that many people would buy the book after seeing the film.
Now, Amazon has decided to make the text of books they're selling
available for online reading. The CEO, Jeff Bezos, understands the
principle that my friend knew: many people who taste a book online
will buy a hard copy of it.
Amazon's approach is unusual. You begin by searching inside the book
for a word or phrase. "Search Inside the Book" then searches
the authors, subjects, titles and complete inside text of more than
120,000 books involving 33 million pages.
Online access to books can be gained in several ways. Difficult as it
may seem, a book can be read online while connected to the Internet.
Unless you have a broadband (ADSL) connection, that's also a costly
choice. This is a difficult option for those who grew up reading from
a physical book in hand.
For those who don't mind reading books from their computer screens,
books can be downloaded and saved in a readable format referred to as
pdf (Portable Document Format by Adobe), for which free software can
also be downloaded. Any site that features books in this format will
also have a link for downloading the reader.
Avid readers among the younger generation don't seem to mind reading
entire books on their computers. In fact, a number of them have told
me that they prefer scrolling through a book on a computer monitor to
flipping the pages of a print copy.
Of course it's not necessary to read a book that you've
downloaded all
in one sitting. I normally have three or four books with icons on my
desktop, and I read a chapter at a time.
Having books on your computer offers several advantages: (1) if a book
is in a word processor format, you can highlight parts that are
important to you and add comments, and (2) in any format, you can copy
and paste passages that you want to save into a notepad or word
processor, and (3) reading books on your computer helps to save the
rain forests.
If you're not particularly worried about the rain forests, you can
print parts of a book that you want to save on paper. I don't
recommend this for large portions of a book as the costs of paper and
ink or toner for your printer can add up quickly.
Websites:
Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts is "a collection of public
domain documents from American and English literature as well as
Western philosophy." You can browse their collection by authors,
title or date. You can also search the content of located texts. Eric
Morgan, a professional librarian, has assembled the collection.
The Webliography
offers a selection of Internet archives and indexes for particular
authors. Louisiana State University libraries developed the site and
it points to individual authors.
In 1971, Michael Hart decided that it would be a good idea if lots of
famous and important texts were available to everyone with a computer,
so he started the Project Gutenberg. Project
Gutenberg is the Internet's oldest producer of FREE electronic
books.
They have a collection of thousands of electronic texts generated by
volunteers worldwide. The latest figures for their collection were
announced in November 2002 when they had 6267 ebooks available for
downloading.
The EServer
at Iowa State University has almost 32,000 works published
electronically. Unfortunately, many of these are only available to
students and faculty. Their public collections, available to all,
feature a sizeable number of works not available elsewhere.
In 1995, the University of Michigan's School of Information started the
Internet Public Library (IPL). The IPL now has numerous Subject
Collections as well as References, a Reading Room with magazines and newspapers as well as books, Kid Space, Teen Space, and a number of Special Collections. They also feature extensive links to other digital libraries.
The University of Pennsylvania's Online
Books Page features more than 20,000 listings that can be searched
by authors, titles or subjects. Not bad for an electronic library that
can be accessed from anywhere in the world.
You'll find the Subjects page particularly handy if you're not sure of
either an author or title. The subjects have been arranged using the
familiar Library of Congress call number categories.
The University of Pennsylvania has put together an excellent
electronic collection, including books in almost any conceivable
subject area from General Works, through Philosophy and Psychology,
History, Geography and Social Sciences, Political Science, Education,
Music, Fine Arts, Languages and Literature to the Physical Sciences,
Technology and Medicine.
A useful page for books on English Studies has been created and kept
updated by University Libraries at S.U.N.Y.
They provide a comprehensive list of links to sites with Literary
Collections, Fiction, Poetry, Theory, Cultural Studies, Guides and
Handbooks, and Electronic Journals.
Hopefully the need for a central library for electronic books will be
recognized in the not-too-distant future, and the books being
published electronically by many libraries will be made generally
available.
Those who want an education in the Great Books--translated into or
written in English--from the classics of ancient Greece and Rome
through the moderns, two sites should be visited: the first is the Great
Books Index compiled by Ken Roberts. This takes you to the Home
Page and Author Index. Clicking on Titles will take you to the
complete list of authors and titles.
The second is a Website that I put together based on the 100
greatest books chosen by the Committee on College Reading. Most of
the selections can be read online at The Great Books Index. To read
reviews and buy hard copies of any of the great books, click on the
links to each of the books at Amazon.
If you want your books to come with university level courses, you'll
find the courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.).
In a revolutionary move in education (and in e-learning), M.I.T. now
offers free access to class syllabuses, reading materials and lecture
videos for 500 courses on the Internet.
They call it 'sharing of knowledge'. M.I.T. has produced the largest
number (57) of Nobel Prize winners! You can study the courses free,
though M.I.T. doesn't offer credits for self-study scholars.
Another useful online facility related to books involves the websites
devoted to book reviews. By reading reviews online, you can save
yourself a trip to your bookstore and order those books that reviewers
recommend and that aren't available online.
Amazon and Barnes & Noble both publish professional reviews and
readers' reviews of all the books they stock. The New York Times
publishes book reviews every week.
Allreaders
has a unique search option for book reviews. What makes this useful is
that you can choose from hundreds of options to find exactly what
you're looking for in type of fiction, character, plot or theme.
As Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, writer, world traveler and wife of the
British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, wrote, "No
entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so
lasting."
