I just got an extremely distressed snailmail letter from a retired professor of Oriental and Buddhist studies, who is blind and lives in Thailand.

 

I quote him:

 

"Now as far as I can tell there are no more e-books available in "txt" format but only in "HTM" format. I am blind as I stated at the outset. I use an Apple computer with a screen reading programme called "OutSpoken" which conflicts with many document formats. It also conflicts with many common programmes, but that's another story which has nothing to do with you.

 

"My problem with the Project Gutenberg Archive in its present form is that when I download a book, the file on my computer includes many rubbish characters which make it virtually impossible to read."

 

<<a couple of paragraphs omitted>>

 

"So in conclusion I thank you for services rendered me in the past and regret that they are no longer available to me because of the remarkable technological advances that you are incorporating into your archive. Yours, frustrated and regretful, Dr. Peter Della SAntina."

 

I have told him that most books still are in .txt as well as other things, and that when they aren't, the problem usually is that they are prohibitively long and/or contain characters which we cannot use to post in .txt. I then told him that whenever he runs into this problem, he is to email me and I personally will send him a copy of the book in .txt; if I don't get it to him within 3 days, he is to assume I'm ill and send the request to Aaron Cannon.

 

I know what he's talking about because I downloaded a copy of Kipling's story "The Brushwood Boy" a couple of weeks ago in .htm form and found a lot of rubbish characters in it, but I just read around them despite feeling rather exasperated. I had been seized with an acute wish to read the story at three AM, and after getting up, booting my computer etc., downloading it, putting it on my ebook reader, shutting everything down again, and going back to bed, my desire to redownload it at that time was nonexistent. Anyway, that could not possibly have been a recent post, though for all I know it might be a recent REpost. Most .htm files work just fine on that ebook reader.

 

I told Dr. Santina that I appreciated his letting me know, and asked him to notify us if he ran into such problems in the future.

 

I think this is a strong argument for continuing Michael's practice of posting everything in English in .txt AND whatever else rather than in whatever else by itself.

 

Anne