This Web page shows the table of contents of our "Old Friends" CD. 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.
The
100 books on this CD were selected by Mary Petrelli. She explains, "These
are books that I discovered from the second grade on through high school,
and I love them as much today as I did when I first read them. Each book
is the key to some very happy memories."
Richard Seltzer assembled this CD. The books themselves are in the public domain and 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. 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
This is the first of our "personal anthologies". Details
on how you could build your own personal anthology.
Details
and advice regarding our books on CD ROM
FYI -- I plan to release five new "theme" CDs soon -- US History, American Civil War, Women, Philosophy, and Victoriana -- so those topics are taken. But other themes that have not yet been turned into CDs are available, or you could create any number of idiosyncratic collections based on your personal tastes and preferences.
This is your opportunity
Richard Seltzer, seltzer@samizdat.com
For details about this publishing service, check the readme document. Please visit our online store at http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat
Teachers' and Students' Guide: Suggestions on how to get the most out of your books on CD ROM
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 and html books (unencrypted) on CD ROM, 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
Text-to-voice conversion software can allow you to hear as well as read these books. So you can test this capability and decide if it might be valuable to you, we include the include the installation file for ReadPlease 2003 on this CD. You can use that file to install a trial copy of ReadPlease Plus, which is a commercial-quality product and can read files of any size. This trial copy is good for 30 days, after which, if you wish, you could buy a license from ReadPlease for $49.95. As an alternative, you can use that same file to install their free version, which doesn't expire, but which can only handle 16K of text at a time; which means that to read a book, you would have to copy and paste one peice of text after another.
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
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).
This site is published by B&R Samizdat Express, 33 Gould St., West Roxbury, MA 02132-002. 617-469-2269 seltzer@samizdat.com
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
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