E-texts
 

E-Texting
 
The WWW now reflects a near flurry of activity concerning accessible e-books. Project Gutenberg with its Distributed Proofreaders, publishing houses, the University of Virginia and many other larger universities seem to be in a virtual race to convert all known books and texts into an electronic form. A sampling of the many internet sources may be seen here.

New or recent books, of course, are composed on computers; these are immediately ready for display or download. But older books which precede the computer age must be scanned to render them into an electronic or binary form. Their format varies widely from photographic page images to ascii optical character recognition (OCR).

The easiest conversion, by far, is the mere scanning and display of page images. Many purist bibliophiles prefer this format for preservation of the original publication appearance. While advantage is gained in preservation and simplicity in this treatment, these computer files tend to be rather large - like photographic image files.

OCR offers its own advantages. The final product is as readable as typed text and yields compact text files. The text files may be compressed (zipped) into files 1/10 to 1/2 the size of the original. This offers a real savings in reduced storage. In some cases it is possible to nearly replicate the original text appearance through the use of various text fonts. The downside of the OCR process is that it is much more labor intense and inexact; a great deal of time is required for proofreading and correction.

I, too, have been bitten by the etexting bug and have converted a few books into electronic text format. Most of these are still under copyright restriction; however, a small handfull are now in public domain and may be freely displayed. My limited website size requires that I make available very few of these at once. Nevertheless, it is time to give back a little of what I so liberally have taken. Below are links to my few e-texts.

1) The City of Tagaste, and A Dream and a Prophecy by Fra Elbertus (pseudonym of Elbert Hubbard); hand illumined by Harriet Robarge; 50 pp, complete; printed 1900 by Roycroft on handmade paper by J. Whatman with J. Whatman 1895, J. Whatman 1897 and Roycroft watermarks; 3/4 suede binding; measures 8.3" x 10.5" x 1/2". E-text is page images.

2) Dot and Tot of Merryland by L. Frank Baum; zipped, complete text in Microsoft Works Word Processor format - 97 kb (text only, no illustrations). Source: 1994 reprint with copyrighted illustrations by Donald Abbott; The Emerald City Press, New York.

3) Experiments and Observations on Electricity by Benjamin Franklin, 38 pp - scanned original; no illustrations (pdf: Franklin-1749-all.pdf, approx. 7.9 mb); printed in London for David Henry, 1749.

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