Victor Appleton, pseudonym of the authors of the Tom Swift Series

This Web page shows the table of contents of our Victor Appleton/Tom Swift CD, with 27 books. Internal links will take you to the various sections, but you cannot get to the books themselves here on the Web. For that you need the CD.

This CD was compiled by Richard Seltzer. The books themselves are in the public domain and in plain text format. You can copy them onto your hard drive for convenience, or make an archival copy of the CD, as backup in case of damage to the original. But the collection and its indexes, created for your convenience, are under copyright. Please contact us first if you are interested in making copies of this CD for commercial purposes. seltzer@samizdat.com

According to Wikipedia, "Tom Swift is the young protagonist in several series of juvenile adventure novels which began in the early twentieth century and continues to the present. Each such series stars a hero named Tom Swift who is a genius inventor and whose breakthroughs in technology (especially transport technology) drive the plots of the novels, placing them in a genre sometimes called "invention fiction" or "Edisonade". Some of the later heroes might be considered the same character after a rebooted continuity, but in at least one series, Tom Swift was identified as a relative of the original Tom Swift. The first books were outlined by Edward Stratemeyer and his Stratemeyer Syndicate, written by ghostwriters and all credited to the house name of Victor Appleton."

This CD contains the first 25 books of the Tom Swift series, the only ones published in the US before 1923, and hence clearly in the public domain, plus 2 books of the Moving Picture Boys series, This Web page shows the table of contents of our Frank Baum CD, with 36 books. Internal links will take you to the various sections, but you cannot get to the books themselves here on the Web. For that you need the CD.

Intended for use with Windows and Linux PCs and recent Macs (OS X), this CD with 27 books in plain text, is available for $12 at our online store. http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat/appleton.html

Table of Contents

Tom Swift

1. Tom Swift and His Motor Cycle; or, Fun and Adventure on the Road (1910)
2. Tom Swift and His Motor Boat; or, The Rivals of Lake Carlopa
3. Tom Swift and His Airship; or, The Stirring Cruise of the Red Cloud
4. Tom Swift and His Submarine Boat; or, Under the Ocean for Sunken Treasure
5. Tom Swift and His Electric Runabout; or, The Speediest Car on the Road
6. Tom Swift and His Wireless Message; or, The Castaways of Earthquake Island 1911
7. Tom Swift Among the Diamond Makers; or, The Secret of Phantom Mountain
8. Tom Swift in the Caves of Ice; or, The Wreck of the Airship
9. Tom Swift and His Sky Racer; or, The Quickest Flight on Record
10. Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle; or, Daring Adventures on Elephant Island
11. Tom Swift in the City of Gold; or, Marvelous Adventures Underground 1912
12. Tom Swift and His Air Glider; or, Seeking the Platinum Treasure
13. Tom Swift in Captivity; or, A Daring Escape by Airship
14. Tom Swift and His Wizard Camera; or, Thrilling Adventures While Taking Moving Pictures
15. Tom Swift and His Great Search Light; or, On the Border for Uncle Sam
16. Tom Swift and His Giant Cannon; or, The Longest Shots on Record 1913
17. Tom Swift and His Photo Telephone; or, The Picture That Saved a Fortune 1914
18. Tom Swift and His Aerial Warship; or, The Naval Terror of the Seas 1915
19. Tom Swift and His Big Tunnel; or, The Hidden City of the Andes 1916
20. Tom Swift in the Land of Wonders; or, The Underground Search for the Idol of Gold 1917
21. Tom Swift and His War Tank; or, Doing His Bit for Uncle Sam 1918
22. Tom Swift and His Air Scout; or, Uncle Sam's Mastery of the Sky 1919
23. Tom Swift and His Undersea Search; or, The Treasure on the Floor of the Atlantic 1920
24. Tom Swift Among the Fire Fighters; or, Battling with Flames in the Air 1921
25. Tom Swift and His Electric Locomotive; or, Two Miles a Minute on the Rails 1922

Moving Picture Boys

• Moving Picture Boys at Panama
• Moving Picture Boys at the War Front

User's Guide: Suggestions on how to get the most out of your books on CD ROM

If you would like to have your PC (with speakers) read these texts aloud to you, while they are displayed in text on the screen, see below about the free ReadPlease software that we have included on this CD.

These books are in plain text format. You can copy them onto your hard drive for convenience, or make an archival copy of the CD, as backup in case of damage to the original.  You can open these books by clicking on the titles in this index page with your Web browser or a recent Windows-based word processor.

We publish plain text books (unencrypted) on CD, and we want to provide a simple way for customers and other interested people to share their insights into how to get the most out of this new way of reading and studying. To do so we have set up an email discussion group at Yahoo. All are welcome to join and to post here, but I'll manage this group in "moderated" style, filtering messages before they go out to the whole group, to control the volume of the messages and to make sure that they are on-topic. Tips and information that would be helpful to people you have plain text books on CD are welcome -- including examples of how you are using yours, suggestions for improvement,  suggestions for future CDs, and useful/interesting texts found on the Web that should be included in future CDs. To subscribe, go to the discussion group Web site at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/plaintextbooksoncd  or send a blank email to plaintextbooksoncd-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

How to install and use the free ReadPlease software included on this CD

Click here if you would like to install this software. When you click on that link, you will be asked wheter you want to save it on your computer or just run it. Choose Save -- it will only take about 10 Mbytes; so choose Save. Then select which version you want to install and the directory that you'd like to put it in. When the rapid, automatic installation is done, you will be able to open ReadPlease by clicking on an icon on your desktop.

When running ReadPlease, click on File, then Open, and browse to the texts you are interested on the CD (or any other text file you have). Click on Play and it will start "reading" the book aloud to you. Highlight a chunk of text (of any size) with your browser and then click on Selection, and it will read the text you selected. Controls in the right column allow you to change the speed of the voice (with a sliding bar), change the font size (with a sliding bar), and switch among four different voices (with the right and left arrows).

When you run ReadPlease, you see the text, with yellow highlighting moving from one word to the next, while you hear that same text. And you can at any time edit the text in the video window. Just position your cursor, click you mouse, and type whatever you like -- for instance, annotation or marks to show where you last stopped reading. Then save the edited file on your hard drive.

Please keep in mind that ReadPlease is their software not ours. They are the experts on it. They have even better versions with even clearer, more natural voices, which they sell. You can listen to samples at their Web site www.readplease.com, where you can also see detailed help files.  And you can contact them at: ReadPlease Corporation, 121 Cherry Ridge Road, Thunder Bay, ON, Canada P7G 1A7. Phone: 807-474-7702

Tips for using/enjoying the texts on this CD:

The easiest way to get started is to click on My Computer, then on your CD drive, then on index.html. (That should bring you to here, in Word or your Web browser, or WordPad or Notepad, depending on your computer's setup.)

From the index, click on an individual work to see the full text in your browser or in Word. Click "Back" in your browser to return here.  Use the "find" function in your browser (under Edit/Find in both Netscape and IE) to find any word or phrase within a document.

When you stop reading, jot down the last phrase (a unique set of words) so you can search for that the next time you want to read and easily find the spot where you left off.

If you just want to read and if you have a large screen, use your browser and under View increase the type size to meet your taste.

If you just want to read and you have a small screen, try using WordPad or Word.

If you want to take notes while you read, first save the file on your hard drive, then open it in WordPad or Word, enter your notes with the text (making them distinctive with bold or italic or by enclosing them in brackets] as you go along, and save the entire file, with those changes, when you are done.

If you use Word, you can Select All [under Edit], and modify the font and type size (to make the letters larger and easier to read) [under Format and Font], and save the files on your hard drive [under File, Save As] with whatever changes you have made (including notes you made while reading).

Note regarding copyright:  On our "Classic Collections" CDs, we include works published in the US before 1923, works from Australia and Canada when the author died 50 years or more ago, and works from the European Union (including the United Kingdom and Ireland) when the author died 70 years or more ago. NB -- Due to The European Union's extension of copyright by 20 years to 70 years after the death of the author many works which had been in the public domain under the previous law are now once again under copyright. Hence we are unable to include on our CDs some popular writers whose works are still readily available over the Internet.

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