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What is freetext.net?
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A place where people can get high-quality digital editions of classic
literature, free to download or read online. Ours are rich, value-added
texts, optionally including commentary and notes. One day we may also
provide graphics and music collections, as resources permit.
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How is freetext.net different from sites like, for example, Project
Gutenberg?
- Gutenberg e-texts are plain ASCII
text files, limiting their visual appeal and their usefulness. Ours are
marked up using XML—the worldwide standard for representing
structure within and between texts—and then converted to HTML
4.0 and other formats for better viewing and printing. This technology
allows for visually and structurally richer documents. We try to make our
texts more beautiful, more useful and more valuable:
in short, more desirable.
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Other sites may offer marked up texts, but these sites tend to be academic
archives, and the mark-up is often oriented towards academic goals. At
freetext.net we aim to produce good-looking texts in a variety of formats,
for a general readership. This is not to criticise other providers. On the
contrary, their contributions are widely respected (in particular by the
creators of this web site). We want to provide links to as many of these
goodies as possible through the links page.
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How can you afford to keep this operation going?
- Advertising: we may have small adverts on our web
pages—for example, links to online bookstores. You will also be able to
“sponsor” a work—and be given a small advert in the frontispiece of
the text itself (though these will be limited to front and/or end pages, and
will not intrude into the texts). The business model is that of the
value-added Linux resellers such as RedHat: you are willing to pay a little
bit more than you actually have to because you are getting something
better and more useable than you otherwise would—in this case, you
“pay” whatever time you spend looking at the advert.
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Why does your site look so bad?
- Either: Your browser does not support the latest standards of the
World Wide Web Consortium, or does not support
them fully. We are working on a page that will rank browsers for use with this site.
- Or: You have a superior sense of design (to ours, anyway).
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What are all those funny squiggles in the text?
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The squiggles are typographical characters that, unfortunately, your browser
or your system does not support. We are working on a page that will specify
how you can make your system's font handling cope with the fancy characters.
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Why do you keep on saying “we” when there is only one person running
this site? Is it the “royal we”?
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We prefer to call it the “world-wide we”… If you really want to know more, look
here.
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If this site is called “freetext.net”, why all the copyright
notices?
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At one point, our ISP informed us that all content which did not have
copyright notices would become their copyright. Although this has since been
retracted, we are taking no chances.
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With regard to the texts, we are not claiming that, for example, we own the
copyright to A Tale of Two Cities, but that the freetext.net
edition of this work is our copyright.
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