Newton's Library
 

After a lengthy hiatus, we're back. We'll be limping along for a little while until we find ourselves again, but we're back to stay. We'll be introducing some exciting new features here over the next few months, so please bear with us while we settle in. After all, not every site manages to resurrect itself after being missing for two years, and not every site manages to cross the Atlantic.

For now, it's going to look an awful lot like it did back in 2002, but expect to see a native search engine (including an indexing of the books) [Done -- see the new search interface], new books, and other surprises soon [the first of these is now available -- see below]. Features like the guestbook and book download counters are for the moment disabled; again please for the moment bear with us.

Many thanks to AQ for her efforts in getting this site restored as well as (of course) her efforts in creating it in the first place.

Comments, suggestions, reports on broken links or spelling errors, newtonbook related questions, and contributions to the library (in the form of textfiles or newtonbooks) are always welcome!

If you have made one or more books but don't want to go through the trouble of creating a webpage, why not publish them here? E-mail Feneric for more information. BTW, you don't have to be either famous or forgotten to get published here! New stories, poems and articles by [insert your name here] are welcome too. You don't even have to create the newtonbook yourself if you don't want to, just send the text over, and I will do it for you!

You will need Stuffit Expander 5.x or better to decompress the archives. If you haven't done so yet, go to Aladdin's website and download it now! It's free, and available for both Mac and Windows.

If you are using Stuff Expander for Windows, set the cross platform preferences to never for "Convert Text files to Windows format" and "Save Macintosh files in MacBinary format" to unstuff the books correctly. (Do this in the Mac-version, too, if you use it to unstuff .zip-archives - especially if they contain PDF-files!)

* - Note that the unstuffed size of the archives below is about twice the amount of space the book will actually occupy on your Newton.

The latest additions:

We're back after some brief DNS issues.

It's been quiet lately, but Tony Kan has submitted more titles and we're in the process of posting them, starting with some of the works of Anton Chekhov.

We've updated / removed some outdated links. Let us know if anything still doesn't properly resolve.

Tony Kan has contributed more Burroughs titles. Some were added today; more will be added soon.

Yet more books added today thanks to Tony Kan. More are still to come.

More books added today, thanks to Tony Kan. More are still in the pipeline...

A quick shout-out to Ars Technica, Macintouch, NewtonTalk, and of course Saugus.net for their mentions of the new version of the Newton Book Reader. Do you know of any more sites with articles about the Reader? Please let us know. Also, we're working on adding more books, so check back soon.

A couple minor updates were made to the Newton Book Reader Extension for Firefox today; the biggest change for most is that it will now work with modern versions of Firefox and SeaMonkey. The bigger changes we've been working on still aren't in this release; hopefully we'll get them in soon.

Twenty-one more books have been added to the library thanks to Tony Kan and Mate Howe. The full Tom Swift series (at least all the titles we're allowed to legally post) is now available.

The first five of the Tom Swift books have been added to the library thanks to Tony Kan. An additional twenty more will follow soon.

We apologize to everyone who tried to log in here this past month or so. Register.com inadvertently hijacked this domain name and held it for 36 days, advertising their services through it, and even going so far as to invite bidding for it. They've fixed it now, theoretically. We plan on keeping Newton's Library going indefinitely; if you spot any more problems, please let us know via Saugus.net and we'll address them immediately.

We're still alive and still working on the Newton book reading extension. We know the current version doesn't work with the latest version of Firefox. We'll be addressing it soon.

A few new books have been added to the collection, all courtesy of Matt Kowalczyk.

Thanks to the hard work of Tony Kan, Tolstoy's mammoth novel War and Peace is now available in its entirety. It can be downloaded from the "T" section (for "Tolstoy", of course) and its content should start appearing in searches this weekend sometime.

The search facility (that we had temporarily disabled for updates) has been restored. It is again possible to search the full textual content of all the Newton books on this site.

The Search Facility will temporarily be producing incomplete results as we're in the midst of a big hardware and software upgrade. It should be back to normal early next week sometime.

We're hard at work on a new version of the Newton Book Reader Extension for Firefox; it should hopefully be publicly available within a few weeks. In the meanwhile we'd like to give a quick shout out to those who've noted Newton's Library or the new Newton Book Reader; the ones we know about include: Macintouch, newton.guhl.net, Lorem Ipsum Books, and John Gardner's Weblog. These are of course in addition to the places that we announced it on directly ourselves (Saugus.net, NewtonTalk, Revotera Voyagho, the Saugus Community Blog, and Digg).

If you've mentioned Newton's Library or the Newton Book Reader Extension in your blog or on your web site, please let us know and we'll mention you, too.

We released the third public version of our new Newton book reading extension this morning. You can read all the details of what's changed in the Change Log, but the biggies are that it now supports tables of contents and internal links. It also now runs on Firefox 1.5.0.1 (and theoretically on current versions of Seamonkey and Flock, although these have not been really tested). As usual, look for the Newton book reader option in the Tools menu after installation.

We released the second public version of our new Newton book reading extension over the weekend. It's had some pretty intensive internal changes; you can see the details in the Change Log, but the key difference is that it gets rid of the "Unresponsive Script Warning" for those who didn't know how to change (or chose not to change) their Firefox dom.max_script_run_time variable. Note that the original version still always worked, but that warning got really annoying after awhile. As before, after installation look for the new Newton book reader option in the Tools menu.

We're happy to report that our new Newton book reading extension has reached public alpha. Brave souls are encouraged to try it out and let us know what you think, what you'd like to see added, etc.

We've now got a search interface that just focuses on Newton books. It's no longer necessary to use the Saugus.net Search Facility, and the results don't pull in all the random Saugus information (unless that information is contained within a Newton book).

Yes, we're a year late, we know. Don't take this to mean that the site is dead, however. Far from it; progress continues to be made. For starters, we have had the search facility working for almost a year now -- we just haven't gone out of our way to tell anyone about it yet. If you'd like to play with it, try out the Saugus.net Search Facility. Besides pulling in various Saugus information, it also searches the full text of all the books in this library.

We've been making little changes here and there throughout the existing version of this site. We're working on much bigger changes though in the background that will hopefully be ready for the general public by late December. If anyone is interested in helping out by becoming a librarian or contributing e-books, please let us know.

The relocation of this site from Scandanavia to Massachusetts has just taken place. There are no recent additions yet. Please come back again in a few weeks; we should be in better shape by then.