Books and Texts – A Basic Guide

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1. Click on the book that you would like to read.

2. You can read the book directly online by clicking on the cover.

3. There are three ways to turn the pages and navigate through the book.

4. To view the book in full screen, click on the expand icon expand.png in the bottom right-hand corner.

5. If you want to exit full screen, click on the x in the bottom right-hand corner.

How do I enlarge a book on my mobile device

For mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets the controls for the bookreader are found by clicking the “hamburger” (three horizontal lines) icon in the upper left side.

To enlarge the text follow these steps:

1. Use the fullscreen mode by clicking the icon in the lower navigation bar

2. Click the “hamburger icon in the upper right

3. Click the “Settings” link

4. Click the zoom magnifier icon to enlarge the text

How do I view the PDF books?

Usually, you can click the PDF link and it will open in your browser.

Otherwise, you should download the pdf file and read it on your device using a reader such as Adobe Acrobat Reader.

How do I read the books in other formats, like ePub, Mobi, PDF?

  • ePub is an open textual format (not images of pages). Many readers are available. A free one is from Adobe.
  • Mobi is a proprietary textual format from Amazon supported on the Kindle.

Tips for uploading scanned books and other text documents

  • Scan individual pages rather than spreads.
  • PDF is the easiest format to use for uploading books.
  • Use hi-res files (we use 600 ppi). Add _images.zip to uploaded zip files that contain images. png, jpg, jp2 and tif files are the accepted formats.
  • For file names, use only unaccented Roman letters, numbers, dashes, underscores, and spaces.
  • Keep file names to under 100 characters.
  • When uploading multiple books to a single page, prepend the file names with numbers to force the list order you would like to see. e.g. use 01, 02, 03, etc.
  • Always specify the language so OCR can run correctly. if there is more than one language, add additional metadata field for each additional language.
  • Include as much metadata as possible such as date (published), creator (author), ISBN and LCCN numbers (add a metadata field for these), description, subject tags, creative commons license, etc.
  • For the title field, use the title as it is shown on the title page of the book. That is how the system tries to choose the title page to display in the preview and in search results.
  • If possible, upload a MARC file along with your book file. The name is the same as the book file and, depending on the MARC file format, end with _marc.xml or _meta.mrc. For example, a book file named mybook.pdf would have a MARC file named mybook_marc.xml.
  • Upload books to the Community Texts collection if you do not have a private collection. If you feel the book should be in another collection, please contact us at info@archive.org with that request. Collections can be created on request when you have created at least 50 item pages on archive.org.

What file format should I upload?

A hi-res pdf is the easiest format to upload. To upload image files, read the How do I make a flip book out of loose images section.

How do I make a flipbook out of loose images?

To make a flipbook, you need to upload a zip or tar that contains the files.

Here’s how:

  1. Use only jpg, jpeg, jp2, tif, tiff, png, gif or bmp files. Any combination of them is acceptable.
  2. Name your files sequentially. It is best to use the identifier in the name. For example:
  • 000yourfilename.jpg
  • 001yourfilename.jpg
  • 002yourfilename.jpg
  1. Create a zip or tar of the files and name that zip file using the page identifier e.g. yourfilename_images.zip or yourfilename_images.tar. If possible, use a compression tool that does not add extra extraneous files. Sometimes the compression tool that comes with your computer does this (as with the Mac tool for example.) Terminal or Cygwin work well.
  2. Upload the zip or tar file. Be sure to specify a language to help OCR. The system should do the rest. (Tip: If your images don’t result in a flip book embedded in the page, click Edit in the item and make sure the zip or tar file format is listed as “Generic Raw Book Zip.”)

Can I upload a MARC record?

  • You can upload a MARC record with your text file.
  • The MARC record will populate the item as soon as the item derives if the MARC file is named correctly.
  • If it’s a binary (ISO 2709) MARC, it should be called {itemID}_meta.mrc.
  • If it’s MARCXML, it should be called {itemID}_marc.xml.