The Life of Richard Cobden now online

By Alex Singleton | 24 April 2005

I'm pleased to announce that we have scanned in and placed online the 1000-page book The Life of Richard Cobden by Viscount John Morley. It was first published in 1879; this is a scan of the Fourteenth Edition from 1920. It is certainly not a short book, but it is authoritative and quite readable.

You can download the book here. The scan is in PDF format, which means you need to have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed on your computer (which you can download free from here). We're aware that on at least one Acrobat wannabe it is unreadable, so if you have problems make sure you're using the real thing. The full document is quite big, so we've cut it down into chapters, most of which are about 1Mb each in size.

You will notice that the PDF contains the scans: we have not converted the book to text. Eventually, we'd like to put it through optical character recognition (OCR) software because that will make the book easier to read, quote from and search. However, correcting the OCR-ed copy is gargantuan task. We are thinking of putting the OCR-ed text into a wiki (an editable website) and letting Cobden fans work on it.

Update: We've established a Life of Richard Cobden wiki, and will gradually add chapters to it. Anyone wanting to take part in correcting the text will, of course, need to download the PDF corresponding to the chapter they want to work on. Happy editing!