Though I don’t read Finnish, Portuguese or Icelandic, it is of some comfort to know that hundreds of books in these languages are now stored on my computer. They are in good company. Just as I am not likely ever to read “Hattu Yksinaytoksinen Huvinaytelma” by Alfhild Agrell, so, too, will I probably never work my way through a report about the building of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s tunnel under the East River in New York in the early 1900s, or seek out “A Lady’s Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53,” by Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacy. But there they are, a few kilobytes away from one another inside an extremely large folder of fellow files.
If these particular books end up neglected or perhaps, one day, even deleted, there are 11,846 others I have stored in digital form, all taken from three text-DVDs created by Richard Seltzer, who has turned such repackaging into a business. Many I’ve already been lured into sampling if not reading.
It is intoxicating to be able to stumble through uncounted pages of rare texts, philosophical classics (from Plato to Dewey), historical studies, early children’s books, opera libretti, lieder lyrics, classic literature (including three English renditions of Dante’s “Divine Comedy”) and exotic travelogues, all of it in simple text format, for easy viewing, searching and copying.Since 1993, Mr. Seltzer has been taking public domain books from the Internet along with government reports and combining them with convenient indexes in thematic digital collections (available from samizdat.stores.yahoo.net). A few years ago I splurged, spending $99 for a single DVD holding 8,479 books. The latest version of the collection, released in March, has 11,849 books, sold on three DVDs and costing $149. (For $19, individual disks of thematically related selections can be had.) I copied the books into the PC to allow easy sampling of 19th-century issues of The Atlantic Monthly or convenient submersion in the weightier works of Burke or Melville.
Admittedly, it is not that difficult to find all this free on the Internet. As the credits in Mr. Seltzer’s books affirm, almost all come from the Web’s premier text site, Project Gutenberg (ibiblio.org/gutenberg), a project that started in 1971 and trumps Mr. Seltzer’s “complete” collection with its 20,000 free books, including selections in Chinese, Dutch, Afrikaans, Czech, Sanskrit and Yiddish.
Many of the Gutenberg books (including those used by Mr. Seltzer) are also prepared by Distributed Proofreaders (pgdp.net/c/), which does for proofreading what Wikipedia does for encyclopedias. Public domain books are proofread by volunteers who are given a page of a scanned book to compare with the electronic text. In 2004, the site says, 300 to 400 proofreaders from around the world participated each day, completing 4,000 to 7,000 pages of text a day, which are then proofread again in a second round before being submitted to Project Gutenberg. Yet another site that contributes to Gutenberg, LibriVox.org, uses volunteers to read public domain books, aloud, creating free audio books.
Quality varies, of course, and many translations have the aura of antiquity; explanatory comments are lacking, and international copyright laws prevent including most of the 20th century. But one virtue of Mr. Seltzer’s compilations is that they don’t require patient downloading. They are also culled from this untamed expanse of text according to theme (“Slave Narratives” or “Books About Books”) or period (“The Ancient World” or “18th Century”) or genre (“Dime Novels” or “Reference Books and Guides”). Each disk is accompanied by a convenient table of contents.
There is one unavoidable flaw: no formatting or page numbering. This can be frustrating. If you want to place a “bookmark,” the easiest way may be to type characters into the text that can then be searched for the next time it is opened. A free program, Plucker, linked to the Gutenberg site allows these books to be read on Palm handhelds; other software is available (like eBook Studio) to set up these texts for use with more sophisticated reading programs (like eReader Pro).Mr. Seltzer also provides a trial version of ReadPlease, a program that reads the books aloud; it is impressive, though far more mechanical than the humanly skilled readings that can be purchased through sites like Audible.com. Mr. Seltzer explained by e-mail message that his customers include blind readers who use the texts with this software (like “a blind professor of classical languages in Sri Lanka”); other customers include “ a cross-country truck driver who has his laptop convert the texts to voice” as he drives and a British teacher in Myanmar who uses electronic books because the government there makes it so difficult to find printed ones.
Yes, it is possible to get more for less, by spending time downloading the books, or more for more, by buying other software or even the books themselves. Or it is possible to take the complete collection as provided, with all its rare-book offerings, and feel a little bit like the traveler — perhaps apocryphal — who would spin a globe and firmly plant a finger down, thus determining the next journey.
What about stopping to read oral histories of slaves prepared by the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s? Or to open Darwin’s study of climbing plants? Or to read an 1838 guide by John Lyde Wilson, a former governor of South Carolina, outlining the rules of dueling? Or John Ruskin’s rich, classic and overripe “Stones of Venice”? Or finally to discover how to eliminate crime in “Crime and Its Causes” by William Douglas Morrison (1902)?
The globe is already spinning.
Extracts taken from;
Sampling, if Not Digesting, the Digital Library
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN, New York Times, April 9, 2007