Free Books ¶

With Emacspeak, you can listen to your email, browse the Web, write reports, programs, novels, and poetry.

You may also want to download various books, documents, and audio recordings from the Gutenberg Project archive, such as Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice.

You can visit the archive directory using W3 mode or W3M mode at

ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/

I just typed

Meta-x w3m-goto-url

and then the URL to reach that directory. (Well, actually, I typed

Meta-x w3m-got

and then pressed return. Emacs automatically completed the name of the command, so I did not have to do so much typing. And I copied the long URL listed above into the minibuffer so I did not have to type it. I hate typing and avoid it as much as possible.)

The index is

GUTINDEX.ALL

and you can download it using W3M mode by positioning point on the name and pressing the return key. (There are other ways of downloading it, too; this is one of them.)

As I write this in March 2006, the Gutenberg Project index is 2 megabytes long and lists more than ten thousand books, documents, and audio recordings. I saved my copy to a file, since I dislike long downloads.

You may want to use Emacspeak to listen to Pride and Prejudice, Alice in Wonderland, The Federalist Papers or other of the Gutenberg books, documents, and music.

The text files from the Gutenberg Project that I have downloaded use the DOS ‘carriage-return linefeed’ convention to mark ends of lines rather than the Unix ‘newline’ convention. This does not really matter since Emacspeak automatically detects the convention and visits the file using the DOS end-of-line coding format.

However, I prefer the Unix end-of-line format. After visiting a file, I run the set-buffer-file-coding-system command on it:

Control-x RET f unix RET

and then save the file:

Control-x Control-s