Sony’s Reader Digital Book and Amazon’s Kindle are battling over their reading devices and the books that they offer. $1.99 at Amazon gets you one public domain book. Amazon boasts: “To use the search feature, simply type in a word or phrase you’re looking for, and Kindle will find every instance…”. Whoops! No combinations of words, no relevance ranking, possibly even no indexing.
Suggestion: Go to WordsCloseTogether.com and download the free copy of The Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens onto your Windows XP or Vista computer. Also download the free WCT (Words Close Together) Reader. Open the book, read, browse, and search with a “research quality” search engine — combinations of any words whatsoever, inexact phrases (for example — a better thing I do), all with relevance ranking that would make Google green with envy.
If you like it, give it away! It’s a Project Gutenberg book.
There are over 14,000 more Project Gutenberg books available from that page.
If you want downloads, $2.00 gets you any eight books together with full search ability AND the right to give them away to as many people as you like, AND the right to free updates of your selections for the next six months.
If you like low cost, the DVD option gets you all 14,000+ books. The DVD is ideal for lending libraries, literacy enthusiasts, schools, English teachers, and lovers of English literature. At $25 + $4 shipping for a DVD, that’s one fifth of a cent per book or ONE THOUSAND books for the price of one book on the Amazon Kindle. With vastly better search. And with the right (and our encouragement) to give these Project Gutenberg books away.
Doug Lowry
dlowry@alum.mit.edu