“A child could do it,” my friend assured me, and pointed me at http://books.google.com with explicit instructions for identifying books in the public domain that would be available for free download. I searched on “grammar,” and up popped a 1932 gem from the Harvard University Library, Elements of English Grammar with Progressive Exercises in Parsing, by John Frost. Since my connection is not the quickest, it took a while to load the PDF, but it worked.
“This is a digital copy of a book that was preserved for generations on library shelves before it was carefully scanned by Google as part of a project to make the world’s books discoverable online …” said the introduction. I scrolled to the next page, and there was the cover of an ancient textbook bound in green. Unfortunately, the next and indeed all successive pages had been imported upside down. Did I do that? I closed the file and started again. Alas, I got the same result. It must have been scanned upside down.
Sir Phillip Sidney
My next search brought up An Apologie for Poetrie, by the right noble, vertuous, and learned Sir Phillip Sidney, Knight, published in 1595. It was incomprehensible, but right side up after loading. Like the earlier grammar text, it looked like a scratchy digital scan of the book’s pages, exactly as they were originally printed. This could be a great medium for sharing fragile ancient books, but I found it a bit hard on the eyes.
Smug, I moved on to http://ebookstore.sony.com/download/ and discovered that while Sony’s reader application is free, and very easy to install, most of the available titles cost a third to half the price of a conventional book. Just to try it out, I loaded a 10-year-old fantasy novel that was free, A Kiss of Shadows by Laurel K. Hamilton. I panicked when I realized the cover was the first of 883 pages, until I saw the large size of the type. It was nothing like the scratchy scans. This format appeared to have been created specially to present books on screen. I found it much easier on the eyes.
So yeah, a child could do it – download and read e-books. I could do it. If Santa could bring me one of those cute pocket edition readers.
