Voluminous

What is Voluminous?

A tool to find, download, organise and read free books.

What do you mean, free books?

Just that: books, which you can obtain copies of, free of charge. This is not a book-of-the-month club or a rental scheme. You simply buy Voluminous once (and you can try it for free, first) and then it goes out and finds books, as many as you like, to keep for ever.

Is this legal? Is this like downloading music?

Don't worry, it's perfectly legal. All the books in the catalogue are in the public domain. This means that there is no copyright on them, and anyone can copy them, legally. Usually, this is because the copyright has expired — many of the books in the catalogue are classic works. Sometimes it is because the author donated the book to the public domain.

What is the Public Domain?

When you create a book (or a painting, or a song, any creative endeavour like that), you have a "copyright" on it. You don't have to do anything to get this copyright; it's assigned to you simply by creating the book. This does not mean you own it, however. It's a right, granted to you by the people, that lasts for a limited amount of time: the right to have exclusive use of the book. No-one else can use it, without your permission, for as long as that right lasts.

As it happens, the right lasts for your entire life, and some time beyond that, so your spouse or children might benefit too. But once the time is up, the book becomes "public domain" — anyone may use it without restriction. That is the price of the right: the government says, "we will prevent anyone else from using your work for X years, in return for you giving it to everyone once that time is up."

Some works go into the Public Domain immediately. For instance, works created by the United States Government are paid for out of people's taxes, so they are given back to the people right away. The exact rules are pretty complex, but rest assured the books in the catalogue have been checked by experts.

What sort of books are in the Public Domain?

If you're looking for recent bestsellers, I'm afraid this isn't the place to look — those are still under copyright and it would be illegal to provide them. But here's a small sample of books that are available:

• A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (along with many of his other works)
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (along with many of her other works)
• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• War and Peace by Tolstoy

There's also poetry by Keats, Yeats, Coleridge, Wordsworth and dozens of others; as well as travel guides, recipe books... all sorts of things! If you're studying literature, for example, you may find your "set texts" in here. Or you might just be interested in some classic stories. A lot of movies are based on Public Domain books.

The easiest way to find out what's available is to download Voluminous and look for yourself! It's free to try it out, with no obligation.

Do you provide the books?

No, we provide a tool to find them. The books already exist on the Internet. If you like, you can search for yourself and download them without paying us (or anyone else) a penny.

Why do I need Voluminous then?

There are literally tens of thousands of books. Voluminous makes it faster and easier to find the ones you want. Would you rather waste your time hunting around for them, or have Voluminous do it for you?

Voluminous also:

• Will tell you when new books are available
• Keeps automatic bookmarks for each book in your personal library. If you read a book on a webpage, your web browser will only bookmark that web page (typically, the start of the book), not where you've read to.
• Tracks which books you're currently reading, for quick access
• Takes "plain text" and turns it into a beautifully laid-out book in the style you choose
• Offers full-screen mode for distraction-free reading
• Has tools to share interesting books with friends
• Offers Wikipedia links for book authors

These are just some of the advantages of using Voluminous.

So, where do the books come from?

Volunteers used to type them in, but these days they are usually scanned in using "Optical Character Recognition" technology. In other words, each page is digitally photographed and then automatically converted into text by a computer. Volunteers still proof-read them, though, to check for errors.

A portion of your registration fee is donated to the non-profit organisations that scan, proof-read and make these books available.

What happens if there's a problem with a book?

It depends on the problem.

As we don't supply the books, we can't do anything to change a book's contents. If it contains typos, or incorrect information, it's out of our hands (we can't "ban" a book either, before anyone asks!)

However, we can fix some kinds of problem by updating Voluminous itself, and we will when possible. For instance: if a book contains accented characters, but they are getting mixed up, we can usually fix this. Voluminous makes this easy: Simply open a book for reading, or select it in the catalogue, and pick "Report problem with book..." from the Help menu.

Do I need anything to use Voluminous?

Just a Macintosh computer running OS X 10.5 ("Leopard"), and a working Internet connection.

Voluminous is a "Universal" application, so it works with both Intel and PowerPC Macintosh computers.

Voluminous will use around 50MB of disk space when first installed: about half for the application itself, and the other half for the book catalogue it maintains.

We recommend:

• If you have a G4 PowerPC, we recommend at least a 1.4ghz computer.
• If you are low on disk space, you should probably free some up first. Apart from anything else, computers just run faster and smoother that way!

Can I read books offline?

Certainly! Although the books are fetched from the Internet, once you've downloaded a book, it sits on your computer to read any time you like: In bed, on a plane, in the park. You can keep it forever, or delete it when you're done to save space. It's up to you.

What about on my iPhone? Or my Amazon Kindle?

You can read books on both these gadgets, but it's not as straightforward as we'd like. To read Voluminous books "on-the-go" you currently need to "print to PDF file", and then email the file to your gadget.

We want to add one-click "Send to iPhone/Kindle" support, or perhaps even automatically synchronise books (like iTunes and iPod), but Kindle is not available in our country, and iPhone applications won't be available to the public until July. We can't promise anything, but we sincerely hope that when the gadgets and tools are available here, we'll be able to publish an update to allow registered Voluminous users to read "on-the-go" super-conveniently!