Ebooks.

My downloads.

An ebook is an electronic set of pages that you can download onto your computer from the web or install from a disk.

Free ebooks.

You may distribute, but not sell, these ebooks however you see fit, provided you do not disassemble, reverse engineer, or otherwise alter the .exe file in any way. Feel free to offer them for download from your own site, right alongside your own, if you have any.

The following ebooks contain texts in the original language that are also available from my texts page. However, each ebook also contains an English translation, something that I do not provide on this site.

Click on a link to download. Caution: Always be careful when downloading executable files from the internet. If you do not trust a person, do not download from his or her website. TextExcavation guarantees its ebooks to be free of viruses or harmful programs. Download these ebooks only if you trust such a claim from this site.

The epistles of Ignatius. 350 KB.
The epistle of Barnabas. 322 KB.
The epistle and martyrdom of Polycarp. 312 KB.

How to create an ebook.

Those who wish to create their own ebooks for distribution over the internet, and who are generally pleased with the format of those that I have created, can follow the same steps that I took in compiling my ebooks:

The following instructions will produce compiled HTML, a set of HTML documents (with the .html extension, of course), that form a miniature website, if you will.

The first thing to do is create a set of web pages, all connected with hyperlinks. Be sure to call your main page index.html; it will be the first page that the HTML compiler displays when your reader opens up the application. Place all of the documents for your ebook, including necessary images, style sheets, or script libraries, in a single folder on your hard drive. For convenience, make certain that your ebook pages are the only pages in the folder.
The next step is to actually compile the HTML pages into ebook form. For this process you must have an HTML compiler, or ebook creator. I use the Easy Ebook Creator, which comes with its own instructions. The author created this software with drag-and-drop in mind, so you can select individual files out of a folder full of them, but I still prefer to create the HTML pages for my ebook in their own folder and test them out thoroughly before compiling them.

The actual compilation will take only a second or two once you have selected your files and all relevant settings. (The program will retain these settings for the next time you compile an ebook, so your second time round will be even quicker.)
That second step gives you a fully functional ebook, but the application icon will be the Easy Ebook Creator logo, which consists of the letters eec. You may wish to use an icon of your own choosing instead of this default icon.

If you already have your own icon, and it is 32 by 32 pixels of the 16-color variety, skip to the next step. If not, try the Any To Icon program from Aha-Soft. It will convert .gif, .jpg, .bmp, and many other kinds of image files to .ico, the icon extension. (Be sure to choose 32 by 32 pixels and 16 colors! Especially if you plan on using DropIcon in the next step.) There is a free trial version.

I, for example, drew these two .gif images in Microsoft Paint, then converted them to icons with Any to Icon for use on my ebooks.
The program that can most easily replace the eec icon with one of your own is DropIcon from ETO Software. (DropIcon is part of a package called Minirun. You have to download the whole package.) Once DropIcon is on your hard drive, simply drag-and-drop your compiled ebook over the DropIcon program icon, and the application will start up. It will ask you if you wish to replace the icon. Click on replace, then navigate the ensuing open file dialog box to the folder on your hard drive that contains your icon.

A caveat: Your ebook may not look any different immediately after finishing the process. You may have to move your ebook to another folder, or close the folder and open it up again, to see your icon instead of the default.

An eproduct is only as good as the ideas that go into it plus the software used to create it. I am convinced that the abovementioned software is an excellent way to go when creating ebooks.

The Easy Ebook Creator will protect your text. The text, in other words, will resist copying and pasting. If you have documents that you wish to make available for easy copying (as is the case, for instance, with the ancient texts on TextExcavation), you can simply post them on the web and let your visitors save them to their own computers.

There is, however, a roundabout way to let your readers copy your text. Simply set up the page which you wish to allow others to copy as a blank target. The page will open up in a new window provided by your browser, not by the program itself, and your browser will allow copying.

How to distribute an ebook.

Once your ebook is ready, it is time to offer it for download from the internet. You may choose to keep it by itself or to zip it in a compressed folder.

In the former case, all that you have to do is upload your ebook to your server just as you would upload a web page. Then you have to link to it from one of your pages, again just as you would link to a web page, except that it will have a file extension other than .html. If you compiled your ebook with the Easy Ebook Creator, it will have an .exe extension.

Zipped, or compressed, folder. In the latter case, you must create a compressed folder before uploading it to your server. In some versions of Windows you can simply right-click inside any folder or on the desktop, choose new, then compressed folder. A compressed folder looks just like a regular folder, except that it bears a zipper symbol. Now drag and drop your ebook into the new folder. In other versions of Windows you may have to create a WinZip file. Right-click and choose new, then WinZip file, then follow the instructions that the WinZip wizard gives you. The rest of the process is the same as above, except that the extension will be .zip.

(One advantage of using a compressed folder is that you get to enclose other items besides just the ebook itself. You may wish to enclose, for example, a read-me file, which is merely a .txt file with instructional, licensing, or contact information for the downloaded product.)

Browsers take over from this point. Any visitor to your site who clicks on the link to your ebook or compressed folder will see the save as dialog box appear, and may then save the item to his or her hard drive.