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This article is from June 19, 2000, and is no longer current.

Eye on the Web: In Search of Tolstoy

There are a gazillion venture-capital-backed people out there taking great pains to turn the Web into something approximating television. Another gazillion are trying to turn it into the world’s largest shopping mall. Add to that the gazillion or so set on transforming the Web into a super-huge jukebox, and how many people does that leave who want to turn the Web into a library?

I like to read as much as the next person, and have barely enough space in my San Francisco-sized apartment to house all the books I already have, so I set out recently to find books online. Not the kind I could buy, but the kind I could read, right there on my monitor, letting them soak back into the cyber-ether after I finish.

Let’s just say right off that reading on a computer screen isn’t as nice as reading on a screened-in porch in the summer with a nice lemonade in your hand, or reading curled up in bed during a thunderstorm, or, for that matter, reading in the bathroom. But, by golly, books are made of trees and online books are made of pixels, and there’s an unlimited amount of only one of these resources. So I determined that I would try this online reading thing, in the name of the environment, in the name of technology, in the name of progress.

But what book would I read? I chose Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, because it was long, because it was a classic, and because it was written so darned long ago I was unlikely to run into licensing and copyright issues. Or rather, the Web sites I hoped would help me in my search for the book would be unlikely to run into these issues.

Check-Out Counter
As you might imagine, there are few commercial sites that offer complete online books. It appears there’s more money in selling paper versions than offering up a pixel version for free. But some commercial sites do exist. For instance, the Electronic Library charges a $9.95 monthly subscription to those who want to read its online books, magazines, and other publications. I wasn’t going to pay to read Anna Karenina (especially considering I’d already read it for free a few years ago), so even though the Electronic Library offers some nifty news tracking services to members, I moved on.

Another commercial site is Bookface, which has a very swanky Java interface you can use to view all 881 pages of Anna Karenina, starting with that first famous line, "Happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Though I was tickled by the futuristic irony of seeing "Anna Karenina by Count Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy" in the title bar of my browser, the site’s interface, which looks very slick, doesn’t display enough of the book at a time for my tastes and appeared to reload in my browser two or more times every time I scrolled down. Bookface did have the largest selection of contemporary books I found, though it was limited to reprinting the first chapters of many of them.

Free Words
In the world of online book sites lacking any visible source of income, something called Project Gutenberg warrants special mention. Begun by some dedicated folks at Carnegie-Mellon University, Project Gutenberg strives to put as many books as possible on the Web, in the form of downloadable text. A lovely idea, if you ask me, especially since I had no trouble at all downloading the entire text of Anna Karenina.

There is also Bibliomania, a site that takes the Yahoo! approach to aesthetics and thus loads quite quickly in a browser window. Like Bookface, Bibliomania broke Anna Karenina down into chapters, with each chapter taking up an entire Web page. The site contains mostly classics and reference books (such as the Koran), but the quick downloading time makes reading there an enjoyable experience.

A fun (and somewhat wacky) place to read books online is the Classical Literature Library. This site plastered the entire text of Anna Karenina into a single Web page, and that’s not all. Every touchy-feely word in the book (think "happy," "self," "felt," and "dreamed," for starters) is linked to annotations in the site’s Encyclopedia of the Self.

Other online book sites include the Great Books Index, Books Online, and the University of Pennsylvania library. Each of these sites depends largely on links to other online sources of text, including Project Gutenberg and Bibliomania.

Last on my list is site I can’t recommend enough — the Internet Public Library. The copy of Anna Karenina at this site was the easiest to read of any I sampled, because it was double-spaced and defaulted to a larger text size. Plus, the whole concept of a public Internet library is one I can stand behind. These days, when people barely have to leave their houses to get any of the necessities or luxuries to which they have grown accustomed, it makes sense to put a library — especially a free, public library — on the Web. Why not make it easier to read books for free than to buy them? It may not make sense to the book publishers, but I can assure you it makes sense to the trees.

Read more by Andrea Dudrow

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