Welcome to Abacci eBooks

Free eBooks of the world's great classics formatted for Microsoft Reader.

There are more than ten thousand eBooks here, all free for the taking. Most have been formatted by me from the original Project Gutenberg text files, with the remaining thousand by the folks at the University of Virginia. For people (like me) who missed out on English Lit. 101, I've tried to add informative reviews alongside the author and/or title pages wherever possible. These have been picked up from Amazon, and have links back to the originals on the Amazon site just in case you need a paper copy of anything, or just want to help me pay for my bandwidth costs here (a 5% commission on every sale comes back to Abacci)

Recent Additions The Fairy Book by Dinah Maria Mulock Craik Home Pastimes or Tableaux Vivants by James H. Head Brood of the Witch-Queen by Sax Rohmer Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 by Various A Smaller History of Rome by William Smith and Eugene Lawrence more recent additions...

 

For the uninitiated: Reader is free eBook reading software available from Microsoft. It's a big improvement on reading text in Notepad, and is my current favourite; allowing me to add bookmarks, catalog my eBook collection, search for text in any eBook, add my own notes to any page, change the font size to create large-print eBooks and run the Microsoft text to speech engine on the eBook (getting my computer to read to me). Finally, and most usefully, it runs on my handheld PC, which means I can carry around a whole library with me all the time. If you don't already own a pocket PC, have a look through the hardware section to see what's available or browse through the links page for sites that are more focused on these terrific machines.

Those of you who have visited Abacci Books before might be wondering why Abacci eBooks is appearing here as a separate site. I could have integrated it with Abacci Books, but the subject matter is distinctly different (solely Microsoft Reader eBooks), and I also wanted to try out ASP.NET, (Abacci Books is currently a plain vanilla asp site :-)

If you are a first time Abacci visitor you might like to look around the Abacci Books site, as there are thousands of free texts there too, but they're not formatted for Microsoft Reader - all the real MS reader gold is here.

Enjoy your visit,

Peter (Shaggy) Shanks
the earl of abacci - www.abacci.com
pshanks @ megalong . com