Public domain HTML books were the brainchild of Eric Eldred, a computer programmer for the Navy in the mid-1980's. Eldred's daughter had an assignment using the book The Scarlet Letter. He found it online, but it was unusable, so he cleaned it up, added some links and created the first HTML book.
The beauty of Public Domain HTML books is that you can add links to help other readers, or lead the them to similar works. And the text can be copied into other texts or easily searched. Says Lawrence Lessig, in his book The Future of Ideas (2001), “...because it lives on the Web, it is available to anyone anywhere – including to people who can’t afford to purchase that particular work to be included within search engines.”
I can think of a plethora of individual or collaborative assignments that would benefit our students from Eldred’s vast collection, available at Eldritch Press.
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