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E-books
This is a selected list of online sources for electronic texts. The files are in a variety of formats ranging from plain text to digital audio and digital braille. Most can be downloaded and read offline. Electronic braille materials can also be embossed.
Websites vary with regards to accessibility and questions should be directed to the sites' webmasters at their respective contact details.
Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts
Carrie Books [New]
Digital Book Index [New]
Headstar.com (E-access Bulletin, Technology news for people with vision impairment )
Tiflolibros (E-Books for the Blind)
The Chemistry Hypermedia Project (On-line resources for students, educators, and scientists)
The Electronic Braille Book Library
The Accessible Book Collection is a non-profit corporation. Their primary mission is to provide high interest/low-reading-level digital text in HTML to individuals with a documented disability that prevents reading standard print to qualified persons with disabilities.
They have expanded to include books that are frequently
used in literature classes.
Government and non-profit schools and others can subscribe to the Accessible
Book Collection and have a large selection of e-books for all their eligible
students for one low price. The annual subscription fee $44.95.
Visit www.accessiblebookcollection.org for more information
Contact details: Accessible Book Collection
12847 Point Pleasant Dr. Fairfax, VA US 22033
Phone: (703) 631-1585
E-mail: customerservice@accessiblebookcollection.org
Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts
This text describes the Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts, an Internet-accessible collection of digital documents allowing the user to dynamically create customised, typographically readable documents on demand. One can search the content of one or more documents from the collection simultaneously, and create sets of documents from the collection for review and annotation. These sets can be published in turn fostering a sense of community around the catalogue.
More than a just a collection of links that will break over time, Alex is an archive of electronic texts providing unprecedented access to its content and features allowing it to meet the needs of a wide variety of users and settings.
The scope of documents in the collection include items from American literature, English literature, and Western philosophy.
The catalogue has three main features: To assist in demonstrating a concept called arscience, a process of understanding using methods from art and science. To provide value-added access to some of the world's great literature in turn providing the means for enhancing education. And to enable search for and display texts from the collection.
Another unique feature of the Alex Catalogue is the on-the-fly creation of PDF (Portable Document Format) files. One can specify things like fonts and font sizes for the output.
Visit www.infomotions.com/alex/about.html for more information.
Contact details:
Eric Lease Morgan
Infomotions, Inc. 209 W. North Shore Drive
South Bend, IN 46617
E-mail: ericmorgan@infomotions.com
Listen to digital audiobooks, radio programs, audio newspapers, and magazines from audible.com, an online service providing over 18,000 titles from the New York Times Audio Digest to National Public Radio's Fresh Air and the latest bestseller.
All of the programs at audible.com are available for computer-based playback, burning to audio CD, and on-the-go listening using numerous AudibleReady™ portable digital audio players offered by leading consumer electronics and computer manufacturers.
Visit www.audible.com
for details about their service.
BookCourier users are eligible to a discount on a new Audible subscription.
Contact details: Audible Headquarters
65 Willowbrook Blvd, Wayne, NJ 07470
Offers the classics of literature, nonfiction, and reference books free of charge. Includes books of quotations, the 1914 Oxford edition of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare, the Columbia Gazetteer, Gray's Anatomy, and Strunk's Elements of Style. Books are offered in various proprietary e-book formats.
Visit www.bartleby.com for more information.
Contact details: E-mail: bartleby.comwebmaster@bartleby-inc.com
Bibliomania is the best loved literature portal on the internet. It offers a superb educational resource with the full text of classic world literature and important non-fiction texts supported by an extensive reference section. Their study guides provide the best in current academic analysis and the 'Well Red' magazine, the best in contemporary reviews, articles and interviews.
They keep their underlying texts and HTML as uncomplicated as possible. The site is therefore exceptionally accessible to the visually impaired using screen readers and speech synthesisers.
Bibliomania.com has a 4 star rating from The National Library for the Blind, a UK charity. If you have any difficulty using the site, in particular if your speech software is confused by the frames, please email them and they will send you alternative URL's to use or the text itself.
Visit www.bibliomania.com for more information
Contact details: E-mail: bibliomania@paneris.org
Designed for the visually-impaired or those with disabilities that make reading difficult, BookCourier is a portable, convenient, and economical tool for listening to electronic text, digital files, and music. It frees you from cumbersome equipment such as cassette players and tapes, or bulky Braille transcriptions for your reading needs. Just download files from your PC or the Internet using the supplied transfer software and you're on your way.
BookCourier includes a built-in MP3 player; a built-in voice recorder; fast forward and fast reverse controls; bookmarks, and other smart navigation controls; a sleep timer and clock; plus easy-to-use controls for adjusting volume, reading speed, and more. And if you have a question about a feature, BookCourier's built-in talking help and talking user guide are immediately at your service.
Powered by 2 AA batteries, BookCourier uses CompactFlash® storage for files (up to 2 GB). The device also has a plug-and-play USB connection for transferring files from the PC using the supplied PC software. Finally, BookCourier is shipped with earphones and a pocket clip.
Visit www.bookcourier.com for more information.
Contact details: Springer Design, Inc.
3160 Crow Canyon Place, Suite 145
San Ramon, CA 94583
Phone: +925-242-0310
Fax: +925-242-0357
E-mail: sales@bookcourier.com
Bookshare.org dramatically increases the accessibility of books for people with visual or other print disabilities. It is a non-profit Internet organisation that allows people with documented vision and learning disabilities to download all kinds of books (from the classics to today's bestsellers) for just the price of a membership. Bookshare.org just recently began offering the National Federation of the Blind's Newsline, which gives you access to leading newspapers and periodicals.
If you're already a Bookshare.org member, you are eligible for a discount on a new BookCourier. Check out their coupon page.
Learn more about this service by visiting www.bookshare.org
Contact details:
Bookshare.org
The Benetech Initiative
480 California Avenue
Suite 201, Palo Alto
Phone: 94306-1609
E-mail: info@bookshare.org.
Carrie is a full text electronic library.
Here there are some books, that for one reason or the another, failed to publish or were published in such small runs that they have been virtually unavailable to the public. Carrie has undertaken to scan, format and place on-line as many of these works as per their limited personnel can manage. There is no particular order to the books selected except that some attempt is being made to make works by former members of the Departmentt of History of the University of Kansas available.
Readers should note that the electronic publication of these works does not place them in the public domain. Copies of part or whole may be made in accordance with the provisions of Fair Use, and links to this site may be made freely, but the republication of these works either electronically or in print, either commercially or not for profit, should not be undertaken without express permission from the copyright holder or from Carrie acting for the copyright holder.
For further details visit www.ku.edu/carrie/texts/carrie_books/index.html
Contains free literature for which copyright protection has expired. Presents these works in eight categories: fiction, non-fiction, drama, children, poetry,Shakespeare, short stories, and classical. All books are in HTML, including a plain-text format that eliminates most graphics.
The collection currently contains 867 books and 1,230 short stories by 216 authors. New works are added to the collection on a regular basis, many at the suggestion of readers.
All of these literary works are also available on CD-ROM in an easy-to-read HTML format. Registered users of the site can download complete books by selecting the 'Get Complete Book' link in the 'Toolbox' bar on table of contents pages. One must register in order to use this feature. Registration is free, does not require personal information. Your annotations, if any, are also included when you retrieve a complete book.
Visit www.classicreader.com for more information.
This index is intended as a ‘meta-index’ for most major eBook sites, along with thousands of smaller specialised sites. In some subject categories, the resources you find here are more comprehensive.
Digital Book Index provides links to more than 114,000 title records from more than 1800 commercial and non-commercial publishers, universities, and various private sites. About 75,000 of these books, texts, and documents are available free, while many others are available at a very modest cost.
You will find books on various topics such as: literature and languages, history, social sciences, medicine and health, math’s and science, philosophy and religion, law, arts, children’s e-books, agriculture, business, education, history, transportation, textbooks, cooking and food, games, pets, travel books, environmentalism, and various area studies: native-Americans, Afro-Americans, etc.
For details visit www.digitalbookindex.org/ or www.digitalbookindex.com/
Combines a free online archive of tens of thousands of SGML- and XML-encoded electronic texts and images in the humanities with a service at the University of Virginia Library that offers hardware and software suitable for the creation and analysis of text. Most material is in SGML or XML; site includes tools for reading these file types.
Contact details: Electronic Text Center
Alderman Library, Box 400148
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA 22904
Phone : +(434) 924-3230
Fax: + (434) 924-1431
E-mail: etextcenter@virginia.edu
Fictionwise is one of the most successful online retailers for eBooks. It Publishes and distributes fiction and nonfiction in a variety of proprietary e-book formats. Their site features award-winning and high quality eBooks by top authors in all the major genres.
They uses advanced data mining techniques to find books that customers wish to read. This is combined with a sophisticated promotional system which will reward frequent customers. Innovative policies encourage repeated sales, such as an automatic 15% discount in the first week of any new title’s launch.
They now supports eight major unencrypted formats: Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft Reader, Palm DOC, Franklin eBookMan, Hiebook, Mobipocket, iSilo, and Rocket. The website also supports three “Secure” encrypted formats: Palm Reader, Mobipocket, and Microsoft Reader.
Visit www.fictionwise.com for more information.
Contact details:
Scott Pendergrast
Co-publisher and Co-founder of Fictionwise, Inc.
Fictionwise, Inc. 407 Main Street
Chatham, NJ 07928
Phone: +(973) 701-6770
Fax: +(973) 701-6774
E-mail: scott@fictionwise.com
Hawaii Education Literacy Project (HELP) is an independent not-for-profit organisation offering freeware literacy software online since 1995. HELP Read™ is free software that reads along with you while you do the reading.
It has been designed so that people from all walks of life could use the free software to read more from their computer with less strain. That way, anyone could increase their reading without regard to their age group or special need. The user group includes Power-readers, students, teachers, and those first learning to read.
Visit www.helpread.com for more information.
Contact details: Hawaii Education Literacy
Project (HELP)
PO Box 230, Honululu, HI 96810-0230
E-mail: contact@helpread.com
Headstar.com (E-access Bulletin, Technology news for people with vision impairment )
Headstar, an innovative new media company specialising in electronic publishing, online events and research relating to the information society, produces E-access Bulletin, with support from the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB, www.rnib.com).
This Bulletin is a free, independent monthly e-mail newsletter on information technology issues for people with visual impairment and blindness. The Bulletin covers everything from consumer electronics to the Internet, examining design and access issues and technical developments.
To subscribe to E-access Bulletin, you can email to - eab-subs@headstar.com with the words 'subscribe eab' in the subject header. Your email address will be held in complete privacy – as per the privacy policy of the organization.
Contact details: E-Access Bulletin
Headstar Ltd
Croudace House
Godstone Road
CaterhamSurrey CR3 6RE
Phone: +01273 267173
E-mail: Subscribe at, eab-subs@headstar.com
Website: www.e-accessibility.com/
or www.headstar.com/eab
Offers more than thirty-seven thousand e-book titles in subjects such as arts, business, history, literature, religion, science, and technology to academic, public, and corporate libraries that purchase a collection of titles.
Patrons must create an account with an affiliated library
in order to
access the collection. Books are in a proprietary e-book format.
The Online Books Page(215) 573-0758 or (215) 898-7091
Contact details: NetLibrary, Inc.
4888 Pearl East Circle
Boulder, CO 80301
E-mail: sales@netlibrary.com
Website: www.netlibrary.com
Has hundreds of free classic books that are in the public domain, including United States historical documents and presidential inaugural addresses. Bookscan be read online one page at a time.
Contact details: G. Edward Johnson
E-mail: contact@PageByPageBooks.com
Website: www.pagebypagebooks.com
This is the first and largest single collection of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today. Their collection is of morre than 13,000 eBooks, which are older literary works that are in the public domain in the United States. All may be freely downloaded and read.
Its philosophy is to make information, books and other materials available to the general public in forms a vast majority of the computers, programs and people can easily read, use, quote, and search.
Visit http://www.gutenberg.net for more information.
Contact details: Project Gutenberg is committed to plain electronic text. Please do not send HTML email. Please be sure to include a descriptive subject line in your email message, otherwise it might end up in their spam jail. They have munged the e-mail addresses to use _AT_ instead of @ , so please change to an @ before sending: helpATpglaf.org
Includes more than nineteen thousand English works that are available online at no charge. Has a listing of foreign language and literature resources and an archive of serials. Books are in HTML format.
Major parts of the site include:
- An index of thousands of online books freely readable on the Internet
- Pointers to significant directories and archives of online texts
- Special exhibits of particularly interesting classes of online books
- Information on how readers can help support the growth of online books
Contact details:
E-mail: onlinebooks@pobox.upenn.edu
Website: onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu
This online library offers a smarter way to research. Questia has a collection of books and journal articles in the humanities and social sciences, selected by professional collection development librarians.
The site has a listing of more than 6000 research topics. It uses dynamic HTML and Javascript. The site offers monthly ($24.95), quarterly ($49.95), and annual ($129.95) subscription plans.
Visit www.questia.com for more information
Tiflolibros (E-Books for the Blind)
Has more than five thousand digital books in Spanish that can be downloaded. Includes a small but growing number of books in English, German, French, Italian,and Portuguese. One has to register to receive password to access collection.
Web-Braille800-424-8567
Website: www.tiflolibros.com.ar
The Chemistry Hypermedia Project (On-line resources for students, educators, and scientists)
The Chemistry Hypermedia Project is exploring new ways to apply computer and network technology to help students learn chemistry, and to help educators teach chemistry.
The specific goals of this project are:
To use the internet to provide supplemental educational resources to chemistry students.
To determine effective hypermedia designs for chemical education.
To evaluate the distribution of multimedia educational
material over the internet.
To develop, evaluate, and disseminate prototype programs for creating
interactive exercises.
Contact details: Professor Brian Tissue
Department of Chemistry
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Blacksburg, VA 24061-0212
Phone: +(540) 231-3786
Fax: +(540) 231-3255
E-mail: tissue@vt.edu
Website: www.chem.vt.edu/chem-ed/vt-chem-ed.html
The Electronic Braille Book Library
A project of the International Braille Research Center. The Library contains more than one thousand titles of electronic braille books, including classics and publications of the National Federation of the Blind.
There are two ways to read the books in this collection. One can read them on-line if one has access to a paperless Braille Display device or can download them to read off-line either in hard-copy Braille or by loading them in to devices such as Braille note-takers.
One can download individual parts of a book, an individual book, or an entire collection of books by a specific author simply by selecting the appropriate links on the specified pages. These "e-Braille" books are ascii text files which appear as grade II English Braille on paperless Braille displays and Braille printers.
Contact details: Internet Public Library
(IPL) Books Collection(734) 764-4386
International Braille Research Center
1800 Johnson Street
Baltimore, MD 21230
Phone: +410-659-9314 X367
Fax: +410-685-5653
E-mail: mgosse@prodigy.net
Website: www.braille.org/braille_books/
This is a web site devoted to the reading, writing, and discussion of literature. It features more than 2,000 books, stories, poems, plays, and religious and historical documents that can be read online. One can find them listed by author or by title. Also, one can buy them all on CD-ROM for $19.99 and have the works in a portable, easy to print format.
4Literature also provides a way to discuss literature with others who like to read and write. One can write essays or articles about one’s favorite books and authors, keep a diary/journal, or even submit your own original fiction.
Visit www.4literature.net for more information.
Contact details:
E-mail: 4Literaturejaret.wilson@javatar.net
If you are using a screen reader, you can jump to the navigational links to other areas of the site by clicking here
If you would like to know more about E-books, please write to us at inspiration@eyeway.org.
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