One of my pet peeves with online books is the very poor level of typography. Great sites like Project Gutenberg have digitised versions of texts, but they look horrible. Now, people have tried to rectify this, for example Gutenmark, but what if you don’t have LaTeX? Also, try looking at the texts in ‘presentation mode’—they might be fine for print, but not screen. To that end, I’ve put together a LaTeX template which I will use to put together some nicely formatted versions of some e-texts.
- The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells
- I have various Isaac Asimov short stories here: Profession, The Feeling of Power, and, best of all, The Last Question.
- I also have a copy of Barchester Towers, by Anthony Trollope.
Now, just a point about the licences. Obviously, the Trollope is out of copyright, but Asimov is not. The stories were found on the internet, one of them reproduced with permission, the others of unknown legality. If the copyright holder (be it his estate or publisher etc.) wishes me to take any of them down, I will.