Free epub children's picture books
![[DRM Free ePub logo]](images/drmfreeepub.png)
These were created from the free books available as part of Project Gutenberg. Of all eBook formats, I chose the epub standard because it's open and well-documented, it makes good use of existing standards, and the FBReader eBook reader program can read epub files. Most importantly, FBReader is the only eBook reader that I know can run on the OLPC XO laptop.
20 January Anne Gentle has kindly written up instructions on how to download these books to an XO and open them up: Use the XO's Browse activity to download the epub files, then use the Journal, an SD card or USB stick, and the Terminal to transfer the files from the Journal's datastore to the FBReader's default directory. While you could copy files directly from the Journal's datastore using the Terminal, the random file names are nearly impossible to use to determine which file is your downloaded epub file.(More details on downloading.)
More notes follow the links to the books.
| Little Bo-Peep by Leslie Brooke |
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| English | epub electronic book (1,753k) |
Project Gutenberg versions | ||
| Aladdin or The Wonderful Lamp by Anonymous |
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| English | epub electronic book (4,549k) |
Project Gutenberg versions | ||
| The Three Bears by Anonymous |
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| English | epub electronic book (726k) |
Project Gutenberg versions | ||
| Miquette baptise sa poupée by Luis de Camões |
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| French | epub electronic book (2,716k) |
Project Gutenberg versions | ||
| L'escapade du Miquette by Luis de Camões |
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| French | epub electronic book (1,681k) |
Project Gutenberg versions | ||
| More Russian Picture Tales by Valery Carrick |
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| English | epub electronic book (4,289k) |
Project Gutenberg versions | ||
| R. Caldecott's First Collection of Pictures and Songs |
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| English | epub electronic book (8,334k) |
Project Gutenberg versions | ||
| Nonsense Drolleries by Edward Lear |
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| English | epub electronic book (1,078k) |
Project Gutenberg versions | ||
| Little White Barbara by Eleanor S. March |
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| English | epub electronic book (661k) |
Project Gutenberg versions | ||
| The Royal Picture Alphabet by John Leighton |
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| English | epub electronic book (2,616k) |
Project Gutenberg versions | ||
| The Old Man's Bag by T. W. H. Crosland |
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| English | epub electronic book (492k) |
Project Gutenberg versions | ||
| The Crooked Man and Other Rhymes by Anonymous |
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| English | epub electronic book (430k) |
Project Gutenberg versions | ||
| Dame Wonder's Picture Alphabet by Anonymous |
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| English | epub electronic book (1,095k) |
Project Gutenberg versions | ||
| The Sleeping Beauty Picture Book by Anonymous |
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| English | epub electronic book (1,969k) |
Project Gutenberg versions | ||
| The Chickens of Fowl Farm by Lena E. Barksdale |
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| English | epub electronic book (415k) |
Project Gutenberg versions | ||
| A Masque of Days by Charles Lamb |
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| English | epub
electronic book (3,265k) |
Project Gutenberg versions | ||
As you'll see, the public domain availability of Project Gutenberg books and the grand tradition of British children's literature means that most of the selections are 19th-century books from the UK.
So far, FBReader ignores CSS stylesheets and most HTML elements that help to control spacing, so the visual presentation of many of these ebooks on FBReader will look pretty minimal compared to the appearance of the same book in another epub reader such as the Adobe Digital Editions one. For example, FBReader left-justifies all text and centers all images, with no text on either side of each image. (When the FBReader has better CSS support, which their team has already promised, it will be fun to do books with more complex image/text relationships such as The Nine Lives of a Cat or Jimmy Crow—click the first HTML "main site" link on each of these pages to see the web versions of those books.) To see the complete list of children's books available on Project Gutenberg, go to their search page, pick "PZ Language and Literatures: Juvenile belles lettres" in the LoCC field, and click the Search button. I tried to pick titles with a high picture-to-text ratio.
For now, I hope this collection provides a good start for OLPC XO owners who want to use their laptops to read children's books. Please contact me at bob@snee.com with any ideas or suggestions.
For getting FBReader to run on your XO, see this TeleRead posting by David Rothman and the pages he links to. (Of course, we'd all like to see FBReader bundled with the XO; I hope the availability of the books on this page gives the OLPC group more reasons to do so.)
Bob DuCharme 20 January 2008