About the Library

The Dunyazad Digital Library is named in honor of Shahrazad’s sister Dunyazad (“World-freer”), without whose help Shahrazad could not have told her tales.

In this library you find a small but slowly growing personal collection of books of history, fantasy and adventure.

These e-books are not scans of existing books, but new editions – I have carefully proofread, edited, and typeset each page, to provide you with a satisfying reading experience.

Entertaining, Edifying, Exciting …

The books in this library I have selected purely according to my own tastes and interests. Diverse as they are, if you like one of them, I think that you’ll like most of the other ones too.

More than that, these books, though written over a span of some 3000 years, interrelate, refer to each other, and enhance each other.

You may try to trace those relations of old and new histories and myths, explore those wide-stretching landscapes of story-telling and experience, or you just enjoy each single unique work …

Anyway, you will not be bored! You will find adventures, fictional and real, a fair amount of sex and violence – or an unfair one – and the occasional cannibal. And travels – travels are a prevailing topic, starting with the Odyssey.

I am a retired publisher of printed books, with a focus on scientific literature, and for those books I usually did the editing and typesetting. The same professional effort and care I apply to the e-books in this library, so that you can read them with pleasure and ease.

For the books, go to the Reading Room. All books are availiable in PDF, plain text and ePub file format. All files are free of any DRM (digital rights management) restrictions, you can freely download, save and use them.

Please respect the copyright notes in each file! With the exception of making backup or printed copies for your own personal use, you may not copy, forward, reproduce or by any means publish this e-book without the publisher’s (that’s me) previous written consent.

E-book Format, Reading Devices

PDF: Why PDF? Because layout and typesetting matter. Line by line, page by page, and sometimes character by character, these books have been typeset very carefully, to provide you with the best possible reading experience. PDF allows you to view the pages exactly as they were meant to be viewed, now and in all the foreseeable future. All you need is a computer or any other device, like an e-book reader or a tablet computer, that can display PDF files.

All Dunyazad Library PDF files have the same format (page size, fonts, margins, etc.). On a 6" display the pages will just be legible, but very small. I do not recommend using PDF reflow to fit small screen sizes. 7", you have to try out. An 8" e-book reader or an 8" or 10" (or larger) tablet computer with a decent PDF reader app, or, of course, a full-size desktop monitor, will give you perfect results!

You are welcome to print the books of this library for your own personal use – for a technical discussion, see Printing Dunyazad PDF Files.

ePub: As an alternative to PDF you can also download the Dunyazad Library books in ePub format. These files have been converted from the plain text files, and share their limitations (e.g., no graphics, no Greek texts, etc.), but for most of the books this will make little or no difference. You can read these files on any device that supports .epub e-books, including Kindle e-book readers.

Plain Text: Plain text is the most compatible and most widely accessible format there is, or ever will be. The Dunyazad Library plain text files have been carefully prepared to make the best use of the format. For a technical discussion, see The Dunyazad Plain Text Format.

For more about the Library, see A Few Words on Text and Form.

The Librarian

Robert Schaechter

Vienna

Austria

Contact

librarian
@dunyazad-library.net

Any questions,
suggestions or complaints?