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Trawling for Texts
By Rob Pegoraro
Washington Post Staff Writer
September 5, 1997
Among the sometimes inconvenient aspects of a new semester at college, there's the whole buying-books thing. Especially when the books you'e bought have been around for thousands of years — it's as if Plato makes any extra money off the copy of "The Republic" you just bought. Fortunately, scholars and activists have been stockpiling books online in plain-text formats since the '70s, making them freely available for anybody to download (copyrights on these works have all expired). The preeminent site in this category is Project Gutenberg (http://www.promo.net/pg/), whose organizers aim to put their 10,000th book online by 2001; Carnegie-Mellon University's English Server (http://english-server.hss.cmu.edu) is another well-organized collection of public-domain texts. While I wouldn't want to read, say, "War and Peace" onscreen (it's a 3.1 meg file!), these archives can still be handy resources for the time-cramped: It's a lot quicker to search a book's text in a word processor than it is to wrestle with the average index.
-Rob Pegoraro (rob@twp.com)
