Voluminous - 1.0.7

There seems to be a little bit of confusion about what our application is. I'm here to clear that up.

We don't sell books. We don't give them away, either -- we don't distribute books at all. We provide Voluminous, an eBook Reader. It's like a web browser for books, or maybe like iTunes for books: a tool for managing, reading, searching and converting.

Amongst the many features it offers is the search engine, which searches through a catalogue of Public Domain books. If you find one you like, it'll download it for you, and convert it into a format we think offers better quality. This feature might be why some people are confused.

Public Domain means no-one owns them, and anyone is free to copy them as much as they like.

We certainly don't claim to own these books. Here's how we've always explained it on our website:

• Q. Do you provide the books?
• A. No, we provide a tool to find them. The books already exist on the Internet. If you like, you can search for yourself and download them without paying us (or anyone else) a penny.
• Q. So, where do the books come from?
• A. Volunteers used to type them in, but these days they are usually scanned in using "Optical Character Recognition" technology. In other words, each page is digitally photographed and then automatically converted into text by a computer. Volunteers still proof-read them, though, to check for errors. A portion of your registration fee is donated to the non-profit organisations that scan, proof-read and make these books available.

We also credit each book individually -- when you open one, a short note on the front cover explains where it came from, and there are full details at the back of the book if you're interested.

We explain all this happily because we created Voluminous as a way to make reading books on-screen quicker and easier. You can read books online already without paying us a penny, and it says so on our website. The difference is, we make it more convenient.