Teachers' and Students' Guide: Suggestions on how to get the most out of your books on CD and DVD

The B&R Samizdat Express, 33 Gould St., West Roxbury, Massachusetts 02132-0002. (617) 469-2269, seltzer@samizdat.com, www.samizdat.com

---

You can see brief descriptions of everything we have to offer in a single document, with links so you can buy directly using PayPal's secure payment system and avoid shipping costs at http://www.samizdat.com/readme.html Or you can see the complete tables of contents of these CDs and buy them online at our new store http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat

Our mission is to use technology to benefit both readers and authors, making books extremely inexpensive, easy to use, and easy for anyone to publish.

To accomplish this goal, we focus on delivering books in unencrypted electronic form, and, whenever possible, in plain text. That way the books are readable with a wide variety of devices and readers, rather than publishers, can control type size, font, and other characteristics of presentation to suit their needs and tastes.

We publish plain text books (unencrypted) on CD and DVD, 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

Encryption schemes and ebook gadgets get in the way of people getting the full benefit of books in electronic form. Today, the best solution appears to be plain text books on CD ROM, organized in directories based on content, with file names that are the full names of the books, and with an HTML index with hyperlinks to the full text of every book.

By the way, anyone can put hundreds of books on a single CD. (Isn't technology wonderful?) But we're interested in providing not just large quantities of books at ridiculously low prices, but also providing a "context". The selection matters. Putting the right books together in ways that make them easily accessible can create a unique context that makes it possible to better understand a region of the world, an historical period, or an author. That's our goal.

• Basics of using these book CDs and DVDs
• Dragging books to your desktop
• Suggested uses of plain-text books on CD and DVD
• Suggestions for searching
• How to get the most out of the "talking" software included on your CD (not included on the DVDs)
• Multitasking? Want to Listen to a Book on Your IPOD or Portable MP3 Player While Doing Something Else?
• Highlights (important works you might not have noticed among the thousands of other books available)

---

Basics of using book CDs and DVDs

Personally, I find that with large type and no reading glasses, I can read these texts about 50% faster than printed paper books, with less eye strain.

You can read these ebooks using whatever you like -- your Web browser (Netscape, Internet Exporer, Opera, etc.), Microsoft Word, Wordpad, Notepad, or other word processors.

You can move through the text using the Page Up and Page Down keys, or using your mouse with the scroll bar, or whatever other navigational tool happens to be built into the application you are using.

I find that with a Windows PC, the simplest way to start is by clicking on My Computer, then on the CD drive, then on the index.html document. Or go straight to the application that you prefer and open the index.html document. In Word or a Web browser, you can click from the index to open any of the books.  As an alternative, you can look in the directory of the author or subject you are interested in and open the book file that you want.

Dragging books to your desktop

With this version of Linux (Ubuntu), after I put in the CD, I click on Places, then Computer, then CD-ROM drive, and I see a list of the  folders and files. If I wish, I can click on index.html and a web browser opens showing the table of contents with links to each book.  Click on a book title and the book opens for reading in the web browser.

As an alternative, I can click on folders to see what they contain (the file names are complete book titles, not numbers or codes). Clicking on a book-title/file name opens the book so I can read it with the built-in word processor.  Or I can click and drag a book title to the Desktop.  That moves a copy of the book to the laptop, so as I read I can add my own notes (including a marker for where I left off reading last); and it means I’ll see that book on the Desktop the next time I turn on the laptop — without having to have the CD in the drive.  I have picked a couple dozen books I want to read soon and dragged them all to the Desktop from the various CDs on which they appear.

I was very proud of myself for having discovered such a handy way to use these CDs/books on a Linux system, when my wife pointed out to me that you can do the same thing (dragging files to the Desktop) in Windows and Macintosh.  I had simply never realized it was so easy…

Suggested uses of plain text books on CD and DVD

Not just a book -- a complete cultural context

With one of these CDs or DVDs, you don't just get a book, you get an entire literary context -- all the major related works by that author, written at that time, from that country/culture. It could take half a lifetime to read all the books on a single CD; but you'll  find that you use books differently when they are readily available on your PC. Even if you only read a few "from cover to cover", you may use hundreds for reference, comparison, and research, and to savor particular passages that friends and teachers recommend to you.

Reference work -- allowing you to quickly search through hundreds of great books

The electronic format makes it easy to find what you want when you want it -- a fact, a quote, a name. When you are in a document, you can use the search function in Word or in your browser to search that document. Otherwise you can use the search function in Windows and point at all the text on the CD or a particular directory. (See the bottom of this document for detailed suggestions in that regard).

Students can use this capability to check facts, quotes or a names for papers they are writing. And teachers can use it to check quotes and facts in papers they are grading.

Tool for study and research -- making it easy to make and save quotes and notes

Because these electronic books are in unencrypted, plain text format, you have great flexibility in how you use them. For instance, you can create a separate directory for each book you study.  That way, it's easy to store electronic notes on each book -- which will be useful for reference when studying for tests or writing papers.

You may want to copy and paste passages from books you are reading into your documents about those books.

Or you may prefer to copy the entire text of selected books from the CD onto your hard drive and then use the highlighting features in Word or another word processor (for instance, underlining) to make important passages stand out. You could also enter your own notes in the midst of the book text, in a format that distinguishes your words from the author's original words (for instance, using brackets and italics). You can also place marks in the text (for instance, an asterisk) to indicate where you finished reading and want to start up again; or to help you get back to passages that you will want to reread.

Tool for your personal intellectual development

Using these same techniques, you or your students could build "commonplace books" (personal journals consisting of favorite passages from favorite books, with related comments). These can become contexts for saving and elaborating your own ideas -- documents that you'll want to save and build on for many years.

Source for class handouts and even teacher-created anthologies

As a teacher, you can use copy-and-paste to create your own class handouts (that you can print out and photocopy) or
perhaps your own anthology that you can distribute by disk or email.

Tool for adapting great works to meet class and individual needs

If you plan to have the class participate in scenes from Shakespeare or other playwrights, you can copy the passages that you are interested in, and then edit them to better adapt them to your class needs.

Inspiration for creative writing

For a class in creative writing or literature, you can use etexts to give the class passages that they can work from and
rewrite.  For example, they can rewrite a passage to reflect a different point of view, or a new time context

Adding variety and choice to literature classes (at no extra cost)

You no longer have to assign the same reading to every student in the class, because you are working from a limited number of text books. If you wish, you could, for instance, assign a different Shakespeare play or a different book or story by Mark Twain or Charles Dickens to every student in the class, and have them report back to the class. Or you could have one book that everyone reads and let each student choose a different book by the same author or another contemporary author to read and report on.

Tool for teaching research skills

You could use the Non-Fiction CD -- which has an extensive History section, including a large American History section -- to teach research skills. Instead of the whole class battling for the few relevant books in the school library, each student could have a copy of the CD, which contains all the works they would need to write a significant essay or term paper -- including major US historical documents.

Source for important, but rare and hard-to-find books

Personally, I find that about 90% of the books I am interested, especially literature originally published before 1920, are out of print. It can be very difficult, time-consuming, frustrating, and expensive to locate and obtain just one of these. One of these CDs might have dozens or even hundreds of such books that would be of interest to you.

A library for the price of a book

A single CD contains far more books than the personal library of the typical book lover. Buy the full set Classic Collection books on CD ROM and you have more books than the typical school or small-town library.

A portable feast

Take your CDs with you with your laptop when you go on vacation, and you can have a complete reading feast -- sampling all the great works you've meant to read for years but have never gotten around to, and without having to lug hundreds of pounds of books around with you.

Encourage your students to do the same -- exploring and experimenting and tasting works and authors that they probably never heard of before, developing new interests and satisfying their natural curiosity.

Suggestions for searching

If you don't have it already, I recomment that you download the free MSN Search Toolbar from Microsoft at http://desktop.msn.com/ And, if you have books on CD or DVD, I recommend copying the books onto your hard drive. Then the full content of those books should be included in the index used for searches. Choose "search documents", and ff you are look for a phrase like "to be or not to be" enclose the words in quotation marks.

Using the Search Capability in Word and in Your Browser (e.g., IE)

If you know an author's name or a book's title, open the index document and use the local search capability (in Word or your Web browser) to find it in that page.

Using the Basic Search Capability in Windows (if you dont' have the MSN Search Toolbar)

If you don't know the book title, but do know a character's name or a phrase from the book (e.g., to be or not to be), use the Windows search function to look through everything on a given CD or DVD. To do this,

• put CD or DVD in drive
• from Start on your PC, choose Search
• select "for files or folders"
• select to search in your CD drive (probably drive D:)
• enter on the line "containing text" unique words or character names or an entire phrase

In either case, your results will list the book files that contain the word or phrase you searched for. (If you enter more than one word, Windows presumes that you are looking for a phrase -- those particular words in that particular order).

Just click on the file name in the results list to open the book file you want.

Then use the search function in that particular application (Word or WordPad or Notepad), to search once again and find exactly where that word or phrase appears in the book.

Beware of peculiarities of Windows search. It is extremely literal -- searching for punctuation as well as words.

For instance, on the British Literature CD, if you search for
to be or not to be

Windows search will give you a list of seven matching files:

• hunting sketches.txt (trollope)
• foul play.txt (reade)
• critical and historical essays volume 2.txt (macaulay)
• introduction to browning.txt
• french revolution3.txt (carlyle)
• letters to his son.txt (chesterfield)

If you enter the query with the comma included, you get

• hamlet.txt (shakespeare)
• first folio.txt (shakespeare)
• life of johnson.txt (boswell)
• letters to his son.txt (chesterfield)
• barchester towers.txt (trollope)

Dealing with footnotes:

Richard Burton's Arabian Nights (in 16 volumes) has many very interesting footnotes. How can you easily go from the reference to the footnote and back again in a plain text file (with no hyperlinks)?

I usually copy a book from the CD to my hard drive when I'm going to seriously read it (as opposed to using it for reference). Then I read the document either in my Web browser or in Word, both of which have a built-in search function. When I come to a footnote marker, I search for the related footnote (they are all in the format FN#687 in Burton's book), then return to where I was in the text by searching as well. It's a bit awkward, but once you get used to it, it works pretty well for me.

With the file on my hard drive and using Word, I also enter marks like
***
to indicate where I last left of reading, and even enter my personal notes and comments (as I typically do in pencil on printed books that I read).

How to get the most out of the "talking" software included on your CD

Once you have installed either version, you can 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 complete file 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). You can edit the text right in the text window of ReadPlease, adding your notations, and marks you might want to make to indicate where you last stopped reading, and then save that edited book wherever you'd like on your hard drive. You'll find other choices under Options.

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

How might you use it? Here are a few suggestions:

• Have the computer read aloud to you while you do email and while you wash the dishes and while you exercise.
• Have it read lists of vocabulary or lines from plays that you have to memorize.
• Have it read to you while you fall asleep at night.
• If you happen to learn and remember better what you hear than what you see, or if hearing and seeing at the same time boosts your recall, use this capability for everything you study.
• If you absolutely, positively have to remember something in the morning, have it read that text to you while you fall sleep at night.
• Use it as a teaching tool for a child who is learning to read. You see the text at the same time as you hear it, and yellow highlight moves from one word to the next.

Multitasking? Want to Listen to a Book on Your IPOD or Portable MP3 Player While Doing Something Else?

TextAloud, in addition to converting text to voice on your PC (like ReadPlease), makes it easy to convert a text file to an MP3 file that you can then load onto your IPOD or burn onto a CD, which should work in any CD player. TextAloud 2.0 currently sells for $29. (You can also download a free trial version that is good for a limited time). Then you are going to want to pay extra for high quality voices. That Nextup.com page let's you listen to the demos. I recommend the AT&T Natural Voices (Mike and Crystal) for $25.

The files for the AT&T Natural voices are huge — more than half a gigbyte -- so you'll need a high speed connection to download them. (As an alternative, you can pay extra to get the files on CD). And you'll need a minimum of 256 Megs of RAM to run those voices properly.

With TextAloud 2.0 and the Mike and Crystal AT&T Natural Voices,  in just 3 minutes I converted Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” essay (56 K) into a 10 meg MP3 file. I also converted in just 30 minutes an entire book (Emerson’s Essays First Series, 400 K) into a 73 meg MP3. I burned those MP3s onto a CD, and they sounded good on an MP3 player.

Fortunately, TextAloud has a feature that makes it easy to split a large (book-size) file into a series of chapter-size files, before conversion; because book-size files can be very awkward to deal with in MP3 players. (You aren’t going to want to listen to an entire book in one session).

Keep in mind that  AT&T has very restrictive licensing terms that may prevent you from doing the natural things you would want to do with the MP3 files you make. “Audio files created by these voices cannot be distributed to others under the standard consumer licenses.” In other words, you can’t share or post audio files you make from public domain books. If the MP3 files you make are for your own use, fine. But if you want to share them with your class, or your school, or your company, or your school district, or post them on the Web, you'll have to buy an institutional license, for more money.

Highlights (important works you might not have noticed among the thousands of other books available)

The Non-Fiction 3-CD also includes such monumental works as

• Gibbon's Rome,
• Plutarch's Lives,
• complete Plato, and
• complete Darwin.

• Dante's Divine Comedy in the original Italian and also in three English translations (including one by Longfellow),
• War and Peace, plus Anna Karenina,
• Crime and Punishment, Notes from the Underground, The Idiot
• Richard Burton's translation of Arabian Nights (complete)
• Casanova's Memoirs
• complete Balzac
• Virgil's Aeneid in Latin and English
• Caesar's Gallic War (books 1-5) in Latin and English
• Madame Bovary
• Don Quixote in Spanish and English
• Goethe in German

The British Literature 3-CD set includes

• complete Shakespeare,
• complete Dickens
• and a wide variety of works by their predecessors, contemporaries, and followers.

Those interested in Native American History should check the Native American CD.

For those interested in Black history should check the Black Americans CD.

The American Revolution CD has the complete 1300 pages of Mercy Warren's history of the American revolution, which I personally input by hand, which is very hard to find in print, and which is of great interest both for American history and also for Women's Studies. (Can you name me another woman historian from 1800?)

Book collections on CD and DVD. A library for the price of a book.
Limited time offer: 2 for the price of 1

Return to B&R Samizdat Express

Sitemap with links to every page at this site

	Websamizdat.com