Books on the web!

I use my scanner plus OCR software under my, uh, ``favorite graphical program loader'', plus some nifty little macros I wrote for the jed editor, to create HTML versions of books I like whose copyrights have reverted to the public domain. HTMLizing these good books has been my ``stress release'' project when I'm so stressed that I can't do anything else useful... I sometimes HTMLize books that other people have converted to ASCII text, but only if I have a copy of the original on paper so that I can add italics faithfully. I've also found that I've corrected spelling mistakes and OCR glitches by HTMLizing texts.

Much of my work can be found somewhere or another in the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, but I'm including the definitive set here (in alphabetical order by author, then title):

I'd like to do MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin soon, and follow up with the sequel, The Princess and Curdie (the princess in those books is a different one from the light one). I'm also considering Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The White Company and its prequel, Sir Nigel. I've got a more graphics-intensive project underway that I haven't made any progress on for the past many months; Howard Pyle's Otto of the Silver Hand. I'd like to do Margaret Sidney's Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. Maybe Robert Lewis Stevenson's Black Arrow as well. I'm sure that this list will grow faster than I can scan.

If you've noticed, the majority of the books mentioned here are ones that could be called ``childhood classics''. That's on purpose. I'm a voracious reader, and that habit started in childhood. I want to make available books that I either loved as a child or would have loved as a child if I knew about them. Not all the books here fit into that mold; The Club of Queer Trades is certainly not a children's book. But my main goal is to make real books that are fit for children to read available on the web.