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SMALLEY VIRTUAL LIBRARY
You may discover that the "virtual library" on the Internet is much larger! It may not have current best sellers, but it does have many newspapers and magazines as well as classics, reference works, some interesting professional books, videos, music, as well as hundreds of children's books that can be adapted for treatment. This column will point the way to freely available books, magazines, and newspapers in this virtual library that might provide appropriate materials for adults in your caseload.
Textbooks on these sites can be "read" with text-to-speech software, which may be on your computer or can be installed. You can search for software appropriate to your computer with the keywords "text to speech" in any standard search engine. Read Please (www.microsoft.com/reader/developers/downloads/tts.asp/) is an example of a free text-to-speech program for Windows that even allows the user to adjust speed of narration. Narrator by Dejal Systems (http://www.dejal.com/) is an example of a shareware text-to-speech program for Macintosh. Texthelp's Read & Write (www.texthelp.com) has a Macintosh and Windows version. With a text-to-speech reader, electronic books (eBooks) can potentially fill leisure hours through listening to favorite books or providing practice by reading along with the computer-generated narrator and the written text on the computer.
Books
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Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.net/index.shtml) was begun in 1971 by Michael Hart, and is the first and largest single collection of free eBooks. The eventual goal of this project is to provide public domain eText editions a short time after the copyright has expired. There are many treasures in this resource, including text editions as well as some human- and computer-narrated books. Project Gutenberg features "light literature" such as "Alice in Wonderland," "Peter Pan," and "Aesop's Fables;" "heavy literature" such as the Bible, Shakespeare, and "Moby Dick;" and reference works such as dictionaries, almanacs, and Roget's Thesaurus.
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Bartleby's Great Books Online (www.bartleby.com/) claims to be "the most comprehensive reference publisher on the web, meeting the needs of students, educators, and the intellectually curious." The site includes Anatomy of the Human Body (Philadelphia: Lea & Febiger, 1918) by Henry Gray, illustrated HTML (www.bartleby.com/107). There is also a section on free eBooks (www.bartleby.com/ebook/) with options for using Microsoft eBook Reader for Windows, Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader for Windows or Macintosh and AportisDoc Mobile Edition for handheld devices.
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The Great Books Index (http://books.mirror.org/gb.home.html) is a nicely organized, personal project by Ken Roberts to guide readers to available online books. The site also provides a "Great Books Cafe" (http://cafes.mirror.org/gbcafe2.cgi) for online discussion.
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The Online Books (http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu) site from the University of Pennsylvania links to over 20,000 free books on the Web,
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The Digital Book Index (www.digitalbookindex.com/) provides links to more than 88,000 titles from commercial and non-commercial publishers, universities, and various private sites. About 49,900 of these books, texts, and documents are available free, while many others are available at very modest cost.
Newspapers, Magazines, and Journals
CLICK ON ANY OF THE BELOW BANNERS TO ATTEND THESE LIBRARY SITES:
  Ditext Googlebooks   
  
  LIBRARY OF ANCIENT TEXTS ONLINE (LATO)
   
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