Free 18th c books

anjirlly · 04-28-2011, 09:26 PM

I saw this announcement today in the University of Michigan's internal daily bulletin. I haven't tried to actually request anything yet.

Quote:

The U-M Library announced the opening to the public of 2,229 searchable, keyed-text editions of books from Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

ECCO, a research database that contains every significant English- and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom during the 18th century as well as important works from the Americas, is published by Gale, part of Cengage Learning.

http://www.ur.umich.edu/update/archives/110428/ecco

Quote:

For the moment, therefore, freely available to the public means we’ll send the texts to anyone who asks, as soon as we can, and they’re free to do what they like with them.

http://www.lib.umich.edu/tcp/

crich70 · 04-28-2011, 09:58 PM

Always nice to get some new 'old' reading material for free.

Joykins · 04-28-2011, 11:26 PM

I went there and all I saw was a free trial. seems like they are trying to sell this in the academic market.

miz_geek · 04-29-2011, 08:13 PM

ECCO and EEBO (Early English Books Online) are both collections sold to academic libraries by Gale. They're scans of very books, though, and the fonts and quality are so poor that OCR doesn't work. So TCP (the Text Creation Partnership) is manually keying the books. That's what Michigan is making available to the public. If you live near a good-size university, you may have access to the full collection if you visit their library (depending on what rules they have for using their computers). But most of those books will only be available as image PDF's.

anjirlly · 04-29-2011, 09:44 PM

As miz_geek said, it's a subset of the larger collection that's being offered. Since I'm not at scholar, I can only ask for the keyed books in sgml/xml. But I don't know if those file formats would be of any interest for the Mobile Read library.

Quote:

Scholars wishing to obtain a plain text version of these documents may contact Professor Mandell directly (laura.mandell @ gmail.com). Those wishing to receive the sgml/xml files can contact us at tcp-info @ umich.edu.

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04-28-2011, 09:58 PM	#2
crich70 Grand Sorcerer Posts: 11,305 Karma: 43993832 Join Date: Feb 2010 Location: Monroe Wisconsin Device: K3, Kindle Paperwhite, Calibre, and Mobipocket for Pc (netbook)	Always nice to get some new 'old' reading material for free.

04-28-2011, 11:26 PM	#3
Joykins Wizard Posts: 1,601 Karma: 9211856 Join Date: Jan 2010 Device: kindle Oasis 2018, kindle 4 NT, kindle PW2, iPhone, iPad mini	I went there and all I saw was a free trial. seems like they are trying to sell this in the academic market.

04-29-2011, 08:13 PM	#4
miz_geek Junior Member Posts: 2 Karma: 10 Join Date: Apr 2011 Device: kobo wifi	ECCO and EEBO (Early English Books Online) are both collections sold to academic libraries by Gale. They're scans of very books, though, and the fonts and quality are so poor that OCR doesn't work. So TCP (the Text Creation Partnership) is manually keying the books. That's what Michigan is making available to the public. If you live near a good-size university, you may have access to the full collection if you visit their library (depending on what rules they have for using their computers). But most of those books will only be available as image PDF's.

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