Did You Know?
Lynnette Taylor
I recently was asked to transcribe Jane Eyre for a non-profit library for the blind. It is 453 pages long—with British spelling. Yuck. It occurred to me that perhaps it was on a free website as a .pdf file, so I went looking. And there it was! The file downloaded nicely and was saved as an .rtf file.
In the .rtf file, it is easy to change a few quirky things like bolded chapter headings, and so I looked at the first 20 or so pages to see if there was anything I could modify in that regard. It was actually very clean.
In the braille file, I changed all the long dashes to regular dashes and did a search for the word "Chapter" so that I could center all the headings. I set the paging for interpoint, but I did not divide it into volumes because I might run across other things that could be replaced or removed. I also added words to the accepted list so that they would not be continually red.
To find books that are online as .pdf files, just type "title.pdf" in your search engine. Most probably, the book will be older and no longer copyrighted.
One site that has a great many files is www.gutenberg.org. One should be very careful about downloading files from any site that is questionable and Gutenberg is reliable. Also, care needs to be taken that the original downloaded material is no longer copyrighted.
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