I chose Mobipocket over other formats for several reasons.
The reader is free and full featured. Other free readers come with limited functionality, and even the pay for use versions aren't all that impressive. Mobipocket's reader allows you to fully interact with a book, much in the same way that you would with a traditional book. You can highlight, comment, link to other passages (even in other books!), copy (whithout restrictions on the amount copied). It is also available for PCs, PalmOs, Windows Mobile, Symbian Os and Blackberry, making it truly portable.
The creator is also free, which means that it doesn't cost me to create the books, besides love and time.
Aren't these books free?
The content is beyond copyright, being fairly old. If there is any content that falls within someone's copyright, please use the link above to let me know. That being said, while the content is free, it is not usually available in a format that is easy, or pleasing, to read on a mobile reader.
There are also free Mobipocket versions of some of these titles available from other sites. By and large however, these volumes are poorly formatted (often being just dumps from Project Gutenberg.com) and are only text. For a discussion of the Portable Library editions, see the following question "Why 99�?"
Why 99�?
What you are actually paying for is the formatting of the book and the custom cover design. Unlike other editions, Portable Library editions of take advantage of the power of Mobipocket.
Each book features hyperlinked footnotes, formatted headings and text (i.e. bold and italics retained from the original volumes), and a hyperlinked table of contents.
Each book also features two custom cover designs, one that you can see in the desktop reader, and one that is specifically designed for your portable device. These covers are color coded, based on the series (i.e green and black for the Harvard Classics) and are usually based on the covers and title pages of the earliest editions.
Where'd you get the content?
Most of the content is available for free on the internet. In many cases it has been cross-referenced with print copies of the books in question.
What other collections are you going to work on?
Collections that will be made available in the future include books based on the Easton Press 100 Greatest Books Ever Written, the Peguin Great Ideas series and the Lifetime Reading Plan series. Note that a few of the books in these collections are not free of copywright and will not be made available through The Portable Library.
Why did you split up the volumes?
My intention for this site was to make the books available for the public in a portable format, not necessarily to replicate any existing collection. Some of these volumes are suggested in many collections. That being said, I have usually broken down books by author, or when very small, by general theme.
If you have any questions not covered in the FAQ, feel free to email me using the CONTACTS link above.
