Classic books, both Fiction and Non-Fiction

Many great, classic books are available today in plain text form (not audio) on CD. Search at eBay for a books category or author name and CD, e.g.

Shakespeare CD

Or check our eBay store B-and-R-Samizdat-Books-on-CD for hundreds of choices.

Of course, you can read these books as you would any other book, one at a time -- with the advantage that you can adjust the type size and font to suit the size of your monitor screen and your individual taste. If you have poor eyesight, you can probably make the type large enough so you don't need to use reading glasses. If you are blind and use a text-to-voice conversion device, the plain text format of these books should work very well with your equipment.

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 (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.

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

If the CD or DVD you buy has books in plain text form, without compression and without encryption, you will 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.

Using MSN Search Toolbar from Microsoft

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.

As an alternative, you could copy all the files on your CD or DVD to your hard drive, and then point the Windows search to the folder you put those files in.

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 by Turgenev, foul play by Reade, critical and historical essays volume 2 by Macaulay, introduction to browning, french revolution volume 3 by Carlyle. But it does not show Hamlet as a match. That happens because the exact quote includes a comma -- "to be, or not to be."

If you enter the query with the comma included, you get hamlet by Shakespeare, and other books that quote Shakespeare.