Alice In Wonderland 30th Edition, by Lewis Carroll; The Lamplighter by Charles Dickens; 10,000 Dreams Interpreted by Gustavus Hindman Miller; United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches; To Be Read At Dusk by Charles Dickens; Life of Francis Marion #3 by William Dobein James; Sunday Under Three Heads by Charles Dickens; De Profundis by Oscar Wilde.
Answer: They are all recent publication projects by Project Gutenberg, which refers to its mandate as being fine literature digitally republished.
Project Gutenberg has been around for a long time, in Internet years. In 1971, operators of the Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the Materials Research Lab at the University of Illinois gave Michael Hart an operator's account with $100,000,000 of computer time in it. I know. It sounds incredible. But that was then and the fact is that there was a lot more computer time available than there were people to use it. Operators were encouraged to "play" on the mainframes to improve their own proficiency.
It took Michael Hart an hour and 47 minutes to come up with the Project Gutenberg concept. What he wanted was to do something worthwhile with the account he had at his disposal. His notion was that the "greatest value created by computers would not be computing, but would be the storage, retrieval, and searching of what was stored in our libraries." He then proceeded to type in the Declaration of Independence and tried to send it to everyone on the networks." He figured that if the Declaration of Independence was available to 100,000,000 computer users of the future, it would justify his use of the $100,000,000 account.
The project simply grew from there. At last count, there were more than 1,000 e-texts from the public domain published by Project Gutenberg. They are all done in plain old ASCII so that they are available to nearly everyone.
If you have a favourite, and it's in the public domain, you can arrange with Michael to have it become part of the project. (I'm working on getting Alexandre Dumas' The Queen's Necklace up there. I have managed to find one copy of it in Winnipeg and will work from that.)
Speaking of old books, another source is Bibliocity, which offers "rare, collectable, and out-of-print books for sale". As an aside, I must mention that Bibliocity is one of the more attractive sites I've seen and the graphics load very very quickly. It's not quite a bookstore. It's more like a book finding service which bills itself as "Fine Rare and Collectible Books at Your Fingertips".
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