Why Virtual Book

Hello and welcome to the Virtual Book.  With the information age comes (by definition) an awful lot of information, sometimes to the point that it is too much to organize and absorb.  This program was designed as a way to take advantage of that situation.

Have you ever been on a plane and wished you had brought that book with you?  Been working on the laptop and decided to take a break... maybe read something fun for a bit, but only have books on the windows 32-bit API with you?  Maybe you do want some reference books to be handy.

Or maybe you like to read as you go to bed but the light keeps others from sleeping.  An excellent use of the Virtual Book is as an electronic book which requires no lights to be on as your laptop screen provides the necessary back-lighting.

With Virtual Book you can add text and RTF (Rich Text Format) files to your (virtual) bookshelf where they will be easy to find and read at your leisure.  For those longer books you can leave a (virtual) bookmark which is the page you will be at the next time you open that book.  And for those even longer books you can build an index of words which you would like to find throughout the book.


How to use Virtual Book

There are 8 buttons in the toolbar, let's go over them one at a time:

The reading list button opens the bookshelf of your current selections.  There, either double-click on the book you want or single-click your choice and click on the "Open" button.  If you wish to add another selection simply click on the "Browse Drive" button and find the text or RTF file you wish to open.  Here you can also add some notes on a book, as well as it's title and author.

The second button closes the current selection.  This isn't necessary for the opening of another book but was added for completeness.

Once a book has been opened for the first time you can add it to your reading list.  The third button does this.  You will be asked for a title for this book.  The suggested name is the file name (without the extension), but this should really be changed to something that you find meaningful as this is what will appear on the list in the future.  You can change it at any time however.

The bookmark button will place a bookmark on the page you are currently looking at.  This option is only enabled when the book is greater than two displayed pages long.

Next is the index button with which you can see or add to your index.  This option is only enabled when the book is greater than two displayed pages long.  Once the index is displayed you just click on the word you wish to find and the pages it appears on are shown in the rightmost window of the index form.  Double-clicking on the page of interest brings Virtual Book to that page.  You can then either minimize or close the index.

Of course, different monitors, different book sizes and different tastes make the ability to change the display font necessary.  The next button does this, and the choice you make will be saved as a preference to be applied to all books you open... until you change it.

Seventh is your handy reference to information on AyeCor Software, and a gentle reminder that this is shareware and how happy we are that you have chosen to try it out for a shortish period of time.

Last is the exit button.  Enough said.

There are three other features to be covered:

The second and most convenient method of adding words to your index is to double-click on the word you wish to add (again, only if the book is more than two pages).  The word appears in an entry box and you can make changes to it as you see fit before selecting ok.  Voila!  It's in the index.

Next, the arrows that appear on the bottom of the form, on the left and right.  These allow you to page through the book and appear when appropriate.

Finally, the paging bar on the bottom.  If there are more than 2 pages in the current book this will appear.  Simply placing your pointer in it will make the page number you are pointing to appear on the left-hand bottom of the form.  Clicking there will bring that page up.




Where to get reading materials for your Virtual Book

Many full-text versions of classics are to be found on the internet.  The bible, all of Shakespeare's works, Darwin's Origin of Species are all available.  Just a few examples have been included below.


Links to several Shakespeare sites
http://coombs.anu.edu.au/%7Eandrea/andrea/LiteraryLinks.html

The library of Congress home page
This one should keep you in reading materials for the remainder
of this millenium
http://lcweb.loc.gov/

	The Library of Congress Greek and Latin Classics Texts
	http://www.loc.gov/global/classics/clastexts.html#coll
	
		Works by Aristotle
		gopher://gopher.vt.edu:10010/11/39

			Aristotle - On Metaphysics
			gopher://gopher.vt.edu:10010/02/39/12


University of Virginia Electronic Text Library
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/uvaonline.html

Books Online is a website committed to making a broad range of reading materials available to the internet community.  They also have a large number of links to similar sites.
http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/8051

The bible in various formats - Resource pages for biblical studies
http://www.hivolda.no/asf/kkf/biblia01.html#bible

These folks sell a wide range of books on the net
http://www.amazon.com

Interesting places for kids
http://www.crc.ricoh.com/%7Esteve/kids.html

Hyperizons
http://www.duke.edu/~mshumate/hyperfic.html

New Age - Future Directions In Electronic Literature
http://ezinfo.ucs.indiana.edu/%7Emmain/future.html

Nerd World has been a mainstay on the internet for some time, this
is a list of publishers on the web
http://www.nerdworld.com/users/dstein/nw564.html



How to order the full/optimized version of Virtual Book

This address is also given on the splash screen at the program's start for easy reference.

Please send $13 U.S. to:

AyeCor Software
715 12th Ave. S.E.
Minneapolis, MN  55414

And be sure to specify which program you are ordering.  This is Virtual Book 1.90, for 32-Bit Windows.