These transcriptions of books by various nineteenth and early twentieth century authors of instructive books for teenagers, were made during the period 1997 to the present day by Athelstane eBooks.

Recently we have been collecting scans of rare books that have been placed in the Internet Archive by Google and other operators. From 2009 onwards that is usually how we have collected the scans, but before that we used a Plustek OpticBook 3600 scanner to scan the pages.

We then used ABBYY FineReader 8 (or FR9 from 2010 onwards) to produce a first draft of the text, and Athelstane software to improve the text. We proof-read the chapters, and then made an audiobook which we placed on a modern mp3 player with the book read aloud by either Fonix ISpeak, or by TextAloud MP3 using any of the very good modern speakers. The last step enables us to hear and correct most of the errors that may have been missed by the other steps, as well as entertaining us during the work of transcription.

We may post the book on the website with a yellow “Level Two” label, which means that the book has been checked paragraph by paragraph, but that it may have a very few misreads still in it. A “Level Three” label means that someone has read through the book and reported any misreads, which have then been corrected. If there is no yellow label it means that the paragraph checking has yet to be done.

This process represents a large investment of time and skill. You may freely download a copy for your own use. We do not in the least mind if anybody wishes to offer any of our work on another website, but would point out that they should state that the copyright is ours, rather than claiming it as their own. They should also state that as we are constantly working to improve our texts, their readers should refer back to our version if they need to verify a text. Commercial use strictly forbidden.

Athelstane software for detecting and cleaning any misreads is constantly being improved. We place a copy of it into the public domain approximately every two months.