Tangled Rope

I discovered ReadPrint.com today, an online library of free (i.e. public domain) literature. My first impression was, Great! Gutenberg with typesetting! I love the idea of another library of free literature; unfortunately, ReadPrint disappoints more than it enthralls.

Positives:

1. Good initial offering of works
2. Usable navigation
3. Appealing visual design
4. facebook and twitter presence

My list of negatives is, I’m sorry to say, much longer. I make this list not to demolish ReadPrint, but to highlight the desires of at least one reader:

1. Incomplete selection resulting in poor search engine response. “Leaves of Grass” doesn’t exist, apparently, and only two poems by T.S. Eliot are available.
   
2. Pervasive ads that resemble the content. Indeed, when I saw the suspicious listing of online coupons (and encouragement to retweet about them on Twitter) I wondered if ReadPrint wasn’t just a facade for a developing interweb marketing campaign.
3. Whitman Wrote A Lot of “Books”. Or not:
   
4. I want the whole thing. ReadPrint delivers content one chapter at a time. But what if I want to search the entire text of a work, or even print off the whole thing?
   
5. No “print” option at all. Some of us like paper, not Kindles or iPhones. But even if you don’t printing a page should at least load a separate style sheet, if not outright block all navigation, ads, and extraneous site “features”.
6. Not Web 2.0. Though Gutenberg isn’t either, ReadPrint is missing an opportunity here. There are no personal accounts, no way to track reading, no integration with your twitter, facebook, or Shelfari accounts, no RSS feeds of authors or books, no community editing.

In the end, I found that ReadPrint was inferior to Project Gutenberg + Arc90′s Readability bookmarklet. Gutenberg offers the selection, and Readability makes it readable and printable: