First Look: Voluminous, e-book reader

There’s no shortage of reading material on the Internet. While many organizations, such as Project Gutenberg, offer free books that are no longer copyrighted (such as the plays of William Shakespeare or religious works such as the Bible), most of these e-books consist of plain ASCII text files. Finding these free e-books can take time and reading them through a word processor can be clumsy since you can’t always save bookmarks or change formatting easily. To solve these two problems of finding and reading free e-books, try Voluminous.

Voluminous offers two huge advantages for reading e-books. First, the program frees you from the drudgery of searching the Internet for free e-books yourself. The Voluminous library contains over 20,000 books with more added every week. Second, the program makes it easy to read an e-book as well.

To find a book, the program lets you search by language, title, topic, or author. Just click on a book to read and the program displays a brief description. If the book still sounds interesting, you’ll need an Internet connection to download the book to your computer. Since these e-books are no longer copyrighted, feel free to download as many books as you wish; the only limitation is your available hard disk storage. (When you finish reading a book, erase it to free up hard disk space for another book.)



By using Voluminous, you can spend more time browsing for interesting books to read and less time searching the Internet to find a free e-book file.

Once you’ve downloaded one or more books, you can disconnect from the Internet if you wish; a constant Internet connection is not necessary to read any books you’ve downloaded. Click on a book to read and the book appears in a window. If you don’t like the appearance of the text, the program lets you choose different fonts to make the text easier on your eyes. Resize the Voluminous window to see more text, or switch to full-screen mode to read the text without any distraction of menu bars, icons, or the Dock anywhere on the screen. Full-screen mode turns your computer screen into an e-book reader, which can be especially handy for laptops so you can read books without the bulk the next time you need to take a long airplane flight.



Although you can open as many e-books as you want, the program only displays one at a time. If you find a particularly interesting book, the program works with your email program so you can send a note to a friend. If your friend also has a copy of Voluminous, he or she can click on a link in the email message and download the book right away.



If you like the idea of having access to thousands of books that you can read on your computer at any time, without dealing with the weight and bulk of traditional books, you’ll love a program like Voluminous. For $30, this program can turn any Macintosh (running Mac OS X 10.5) into a dedicated e-book reader so you’ll never be without a book to read as long as you have your computer, an occasional Internet connection, and a copy of Voluminous.

Filed under: education, software
Other story tags: First Look, e-books