Tips for finding Ebooks

You're ready to fire up the E-reader and get reading, but first you have to find that oh-so-obscure novel you've selected. I am here to help you. Finding these lost publications can be tricky, but I am going to give you all the advice you need to successfully locate them (provided they exist in digital copy).

Before you embark on your hunt, however, make sure the title your looking for isn't already available as a download on this site. I have located and downloaded over 1,300 digital versions of novels mentioned on this site (all for free) and am adding to them all the time! Take a look at "My Library" for a list of all the books I currently have downloaded to get an idea of whether the particular novel you're looking for is available.

First of all, you need to know where to look. There are five main sites where I find Bygone Lore (and they are all free): Google Books, Internet Archive: Text Archives, Hathi Trust, and Project Gutenberg (you can find links to all these and more below). The most rewarding of these, however, are Google Books and Internet Archive. If you can't find your book on any of those sites, do a general internet search... you might get lucky and find a digitized version in a private collection. Chances are, however, if its not on one of the sites mentioned above, there is no e-copy available for it. Scroll down to the bottom for links to these and other sites that provide downloadable versions of old texts.

How to Search Google Books:

1. Access Google Books at http://books.google.com/books

2. In the search field, type in all or part of the title of the book or the author's name. If you know the specific title name or author's name, enclosing the name in quotation marks (as seen in the screen shot below) will limit your search results to titles with those exact words only.

It is important to understand that older novels were sometimes published under multiple titles, and that female authors (in the 18th century especially) often wrote annonymously or used a pseudonym for some of their books. These factors can make it difficult to locate your book, but a little patience and searching will help you.

3. Choose "Free Google eBooks" from the drop-down menu at the top ("Step 1" on the image below). "Any Books" is selected by default. Some of these books are also available for purchase, but most are simply souped up EPUB versions of the free ones, and not necessarily worth the $3 or $4 you pay for them, however that is up to you.

4. Many novels are contained in multiple volumes (some have as many as 5). To find all volumes of the novel, choose "More Editions" under the book title that appears. ("Step 2")

5. Once you click on "More Editions", several editions of the same title will appear. As the volunteers who scanned the books for Google aren't always diligent or accurate in recording which volume each edition is, the best thing to do is click on each title before downloading. This will bring up a view of the book. Scroll down through the first few pages until you find which volume that book is. If the book has multiple volumes, the title page of the novel (usually the 4th to 6th page into the book) will tell you. See the example below.

6. The next thing you will want to do is save the book to your computer. To do this, choose "Download" in the top left corner. You will need to decide whether to save the book in a PDF or EPUB format. You can also save the books to your Google Play account instead and download them later.

From my experience, you will want to save the PDF versions of the older novels (say, pre 1850). The reason for this is that the type and font of the books is often incorrectly translated into plain text by the computer and many times I have ended up with paragraphs of unreadable jargon. The PDF version downloads the actual images of the pages themselves, so there is no computer translation required. Of course, the PDF files are slightly larger than the EPUBs, but you will save yourself a lot of frustration. Most of the novels published after 1840s translate pretty well into EPUBs but if you have the extra storage space, I recommend sticking with PDF's.

7. Save your book to your hard drive and label it with the coordinating volume. For example, I would save the above book as "Clarentine 3" for Clarentine, volume 3. This makes it much easier when you finish Volume 2 to find volume 3. Continue this process until you have located all volumes of your novel.

It is a good idea to look at the publication date to ensure you are getting the same edition of each volume. Later publications will sometimes compress multi-volume works into two or three volumes, meaning that Volume 2 of an 1836 publication may not read the same as Volume 2 of an 1806 publication.

8. The above picture is the information "card" that pulls up on Google Books. The title ("Clarentine") is at the top. The author's name (Sarah Harriet Burney) is underneath. Next to the author's name is the publication date of that particular edition. In this case, it is 1796. A preview of the book is also given. Clicking "Read" will bring you to the book view page where you can scroll through the book, and, of course, read it if you like.

You can search for more novels by the same author by clicking the author's name, typeset in blue. Doing so will bring up all books cited as hers, but remember, as said before, many of our authors used pseudonyms or anonymous publications, and therefore simply searching by their name may not bring up all their works. For example, Anne Julia Hatton also published under the names "Ann of Swansea" and "Ann Curtis".

9. Another quick note about Google Books. Sometimes there is a glitch when you use the back button off of a book view page. For some reason, it takes you back two pages instead of one, so, when navigating to the previous page from the book view page, you usually have to hit back once and then hit forward once to get where you want to be. Since Google Books updated their site, this hasn't occurred as much as it once did, but I'll leave the info in case it does.