Online Neander Resource, Kinda :(

[Jared McMahon]

I've been surfing Google Books (http://www.google.com/books) an awful lot recently, sucking down content and squirreling it away. I've taken the neader-related books from there as well as some from the Even Falls site and tried to consolidate them in one place:

http://www.scribd.com/jedmcmahon

There are lots of great books out there but they're scattered around, they use different editions and/or different copies of varying quality, the scanning can be hit and miss, and the search functionality on Google Books can be infuriating sometimes. I'm trying to take that variety and distill it down to all wheat, no chaff.

So why do I say "kinda" in the title? Because the Scrib interface appears to be much better at handling text pages than the plates, and the plates are often the most important parts (esp. for people like me who can't read 18th century French). But I don't have anywhere else online where I can serve this much content from, so it'll have to do for the moment and I'll let y'all know if I find a better solution. The immediate alternative would be to post a simple list of books and their Google URLs, but then I'd have to pray it stayed up to date.

So, one more time, for what it's worth, there it is.

Jared (Jed) McMahon

[kevin loftus]

Thanks for taking the time Jared. :)

[Jonathan McCullough]

That's really cool, but on inspection of the google/scribd stuff, at least half the illustrations simply don't appear. What's up wit dat?

[Jared McMahon]

It looks like hosting services offer very generous disk space nowadays, well more than enough to host the resources I would want to put online. I might bite the bullet and just do a site of my own with both the books and tool ads.

As a technical side-note, PDFs seem to handle images very oddly. I don't know how it determines what's text and what's not, but it seems to get pretty confused by typefaces that are non-standard.

Jared

[Paul Halpern]

I can't resist a quick observation.... I went and looked at your scribd collection (which I like very much), and clicked first on "A Manual of Carpentry and Joinery" by J.W. Riley (1905). First chapter, first sentence:

"The wood used by the carpenter and joiner is obtained from the plants knows as trees." (Bold emphasis in the original.)

Gotta love getting back to basics! :)