The Gutenberg Reader

The Gutenberg Reader allows you to fetch text from the Gutenberg Project pages, formats it, and presents it in an easily readable form

The Gutenberg Reader is literally an entire library of over 30,000 volumes, right on your desktop. Well, almost literally. The Reader is designed to import and display etexts generated by Project Gutenbergª. These are free public domain texts available online Ñ the Gutenberg catalog has over 30,000 books (and growing), and with their partners and affiliates makes over 100,000 titles available to anyone with internet access. Any of the Gutenberg texts are accessible within a couple minutes from within the Reader.

The Gutenberg pages are actually designed to be viewed with any web browser, without any additional application or software required, and you don't really have to use the Reader to access them. However, the Reader downloads a Gutenberg text and replaces simple quotes with curly quotation marks, double dashes with m-dashes, gets rid of the end-of-line characters within paragraphs, and presents the text in a book-like layout, using the fontface of your choice. You can navigate easily through the book with mouseclicks or using the arrowkeys, set a bookmark, and make notes on any passage. The result is a reading experience quite different from what you are probably used to on a computer screen.