Exciting Improvements to AO's Booklist Pages

In our ever-continuing quest to make Ambleside Online as user-friendly as possible, we're adding more links to free e-texts and free audiobooks while streamlining the website to make the pages cleaner and (hopefully) easier to see and work with.

You'll see some funny-looking little symbols all over our booklist pages, but don't let them put you off - they're very cool, and not hard to understand once you know what they mean. :-) There's a helpful key to these symbols at the top of each and every Year.

One very exciting change that's come about in the past few years is the advent of eReaders, and our favorite etext website, Project Gutenberg, has started including their texts in a variety of formats, including html, ePub and Kindle. So, we've gone through our entire booklist, and every text that PG offers, we've linked that as our first choice by hotlinking directly to the title of the book. If a title hotlinks somewhere else, PG doesn't have it yet.

We've also included a little circle that links to manybooks.net, where you can load the text directly to your Kindle for free. And for those who can figure out how to use the archive.org ebooks (we haven't figured it out ourselves!), we've included a tiny dot that links to their offering of the book; they also offer a variety of formats.

We're also working on linking Librivox audios to each Year. Where you see a little image that looks like a tiny pair of headphones (it's actually the Greek omega letter), click it to take you to the Librivox audio of that book.

We still have links where you can purchase a hard copy of the books, or a Kindle version, though these links are now shortened to a $ dollar sign (denotes a hard copy of the book) or the letter K (for the Kindle version). Basically, the $ or K within a parenthesis means it's a purchase, and the symbols outside the parentheses are free links. The purchase links are what support our website and forum. For twelve years, we paid for webspace ourselves, but since we've been using this system, our site has been self-supporting without us having to solicit donations.

Year 1 is complete, and we'd love some feedback! Years 2 and 3 are also almost done, and we'll continue through each Year, posting each one as it gets completed. We hope the changes make using AO even more convenient for you!