Project Gutenberg provides Etexts of excellent classics of literature to the online community. In the United States and in most other countries, these texts are in the public domain.

Unfortunately, Etexts consist of raw data, they take very long to download over modem and the official servers and mirrors are sometimes overloaded or unavailable.

The following pages provide a mirror of a different kind to a select set of Etexts and other works that are in the public domain. The difference between regular mirrors and this site are as follows:

• The raw data have been (minimally) HTMLized so that they are better rendered by web browers.
• The Etexts have been chunked in smaller logical units (e.g. in chapters) to avoid long loading delays, especially over slow modem links.
• Only a very small subset of Etexts has been selected for mirroring on this site. Please consult Project Gutenberg's FTP server for a complete list of Etexts. You may prefer to browse a manually edited list of Etexts, sorted by author or by title, or look at the complete list (all three ZIPped).

No other changes have been made from the original Etexts. Every page contains a link termed [Source] which points back to the original Etext. You may use this link if you prefer to download the complete raw Etext instead of reading the single chapters here. Beware! Some Etexts pointed to by [Source] may take a long time to download!

Please consider making a donation to Project Gutenberg who are doing a great job at identifying, digitizing and proof-reading Etexts. You may also volunteer by scanning or proofreading new texts.

Please note that this is just a partial mirror of Etexts, which is currently being slowly build. I (FH) do this in my free time, based on books I've already read or planning to read in the immediate future. This is by nature a slow process, as you might imagine.

This local mirror of public domain texts would never have been possible without the great work of people who identified, scanned and proof-read texts in the first place. This is a list of resources I used to generate this mirror. Thank you all!

Primary repositories are generators of digitized texts. They are the main providers of raw material that has been slightly HTMLized for this local mirror:

• Project Gutenberg
• Projekt Gutenberg-DE
• ABU La Bibliothèque Universelle

Directories or book listings are collections of links to online books. Some links point to freely useable books like Etexts while others point to material that is freely readable but that may not or must not be reproduced elsewhere. Only freely reproducible texts (mostly Etexts from Project Gutenberg) made it into this local mirror. Meta-Directories are listings of directories. The following listings were particulary useful:

• The Online Books Page founded and edited by John Mark Ockerbloom, currently hosted at University of Pennsylvania Library
• The by author or by title listings of the Project Gutenberg repository
• The Google Directory section Arts :: Literature :: Directories provides a good Meta-Directory.

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