Girlebooks.com is a website with a mission: it offers free e-books by female writers, all in an effort to “make classic and lesser-known works by female writers available to a large audience through the e-book medium”. Their titles include well-known novels by
Jane Austen,
Edith Wharton, and
Lucy Maud Montgomery, as well as books by lesser-known authors like Hanna Webster Foster and Fanny Fern.
In an effort to judge the e-book experience, I compared the
Girlebooks version of
Fanny Burney’s
Evelina with my print copy. The idea of reading a 400-plus-page-long novel online was a little daunting (even to a longtime
fanfic reader like me), but I was happy to discover that
Girlebooks had done everything possible to make their readers comfortable:
1. The digital version was surprisingly easy to read. I wouldn’t recommend trying to wade through Girlebooks’ Spartan “Plain Text” version of Burney’s novel, but their PDF version was attractive, neatly organized, and written in large, clear font.
2. There weren’t many differences between the printed and the digital texts, although I noticed that the e-book typist didn’t include any italics, and they appear to have changed some of the original punctuation marks. On the other hand, 18th century grammar and spelling wasn’t standardized, so I can’t be certain that the text in my print version is accurate, either.
And last, but definitely not least…
3. The e-book version of Evelina is free, while the cheapest (unused) print copy I could find was ten bucks. (There doesn’t seem to be a Dover Thrift edition.) Sure, you can’t curl up in an armchair with an online novel—unless you have some kind of fancy e-reader doohickey, which I don’t—but did I mention that it’s FREE?
My hat is off to the fine people at
Girlebooks: their e-books are beautifully designed, and you can’t beat their prices. Anybody who
hasn’t read
Evelina—or any of the other excellent titles they offer—should run, not walk, to check them out.
Labels: ebooks, Fanny Burney, Technology
If you're a reader of fanfiction (fan-penned stories set in the worlds of various books/movies/TV shows/etc.), you might want to check out the Yuletide Treasure Fic Exchange, a massive fanfiction archive that features anonymous stories set in a variety of worlds. It's a great source for fanfiction from really obscure sources--there are 'fics for books ranging from Fanny Burney's Evelina to Kiyohiko Azuma's Yotsuba&!.
