About the Library
This may well be the smallest library in the world – a slowly growing personal collection of carefully edited e-books, which you can freely download in plain text format, and for a very low fee in PDF format with excellent typesetting quality.
These are not scans, but editions – I have invested hundreds of hours of work in the preparation of these books, editing and typesetting, and I will invest many more, to share them with you for your enjoyment.
Entertaining, Edifying, Exciting …
The books in this library I have selected purely according to my own tastes and interests – because I love them, and want you to read them. Diverse as they are, if you like one of them, I guess you’ll like most of the other ones too.
More than that, these books, though written over a span of some 3000 years, interrelate, refer to each other, enhance each other …
You may try to trace those relations of old and new histories and myths, explore those wide-stretching landscapes of story-telling and experience, or you just enjoy each single unique work …
Anyway, you will not be bored! You will find adventures, fictional and real, a fair amount of sex and violence – or an unfair one – and the occasional cannibal. And travel – journeys are the principal theme, starting with the Odyssey.
I am a publisher of printed books, with a focus on scientific literature, and for those books I usually do the editing and typesetting. The same professional effort and care I apply to the e-books in this library, so that you can read them with pleasure and ease.
For the books, go to the Reading Room. The plain text versions are free.
To download the formatted PDF files, you need a Library Card. These files are free of DRM (digital rights management) – there are no technical restrictions to keep you from storing and reading them, now and in all the future, on any device that supports PDF (including paper).
E-book Format
Why PDF? Because layout and typesetting matter, as well as permanence. The PDF format allows you to view the pages exactly as they were meant to be viewed, and it will continue to do so in all the foreseeable future. All you need is a computer or any other device that supports PDF, and has a large enough screen – 600 × 800 pixels (width × height) would be the minimum.
To find out whether the format of the library’s books suits you, just download this sample! (The beginning of Richard Francis Burton’s translation of The Book Of The Thousand Nights And A Night.)
You are welcome to print the books of this library for your own personal use – for a technical discussion, see A Few Words on Printing.
Plain Text Format
In addition to the PDF files the books of this library are also available in the most basic all-purpose format there is, plain text.
These files have been carefully prepared to make the best use of the format. For a technical discussion, see A Few Words on Plain Text Files. As you can download these files freely, there is no need for a sample file.
The
Librarian
Robert Schächter
Vienna, Austria
Contact
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Any questions, suggestions or complaints?
Please feel free to contact me!