The World on a Bookshelf - for Your Literary Wanderlust

A very productive author First column: Story # Second column: when I first saw it on Amazon Third column: print length (according to Amazon)

One of the travelogues which I want to read is Reinhold von Werner: Die preussische Expedition nach China, Japan und Siam in den Jahren 1860, 1861 und 1862 , 2. Aufl. F. A. Brockhaus, Leipzig 1873 It exists as pdf which is difficult to read on small devices. You find text/epub files of this travelogue on archive.org and other sites but they consist of 95% errors and bad OCR. The problem is the old font used in the 19th century. Fortunately, there is help available (Münchener Digitalisierungszentrum & Google). The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Referat Digitale Bibliothek/Münchener Digitalisierungszentrum (DB/MDZ) offers high-quality scans as jpg files. Example These files can be loaded one by one into https://images.google.com. You get automatically an OCR. This OCR is now of high-quality. You just need to copy and paste it into a text file. Example: text after OCR "Um 5. März 1860 verließen wir den Hafen von Hamburg und sagten damit dem deutschen Vaterlande Lebewohl, und zwar f...

 There is a site, The Greatest Books , which apparently merged 652 "Best Books lists" into one list of over 21000 books. To establish a ranking, they do some hokus-pokus on the calculation of the worth of the lists and finally it outputs, as an example: "The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is the 3rd greatest book of all time." Negative points of that site: 1. The ranking 'per se' is absolutely meaningless, can you justify ranking "Huckleberry Finn" as #20, and "All Quiet on the Western Front" as #82 and "Hunger Games" as #1371. 2. When books appear only in a few lists, it leads often to 1000 books occupying a single rank. Listing them without rank would have the same effect. 3. The titles of the books are either translated or original, no consistency - which shows that they didn't work on the data. Unfortunately, they didn't provide original titles. So, even if the original language is said to be German, they random...