The Matthias Chronicles: A bitter sweet moment

Today is a bitter sweet moment for me... I knew this day would come... eventually...

Today marks the end of one of my ministries - Project BookRead. Below is from its history page:

Project BookRead is a program we started in 1993 to help further the cause of literacy and reading. We believe that reading is a fundamental part of one's life. Many of the great classics have been ignored or banned from public educational institutions. This is a travesty and hampers exploration into our history and our roots as a human race. Reading is a wonderful thing and can be very entertaining. Project BookRead brings the classics as well as contemporary works to the computer world.

Project BookRead is a massive online library. We do not believe in book banning and will NOT condone it. You will find many books from Mary Shelly, Booker T. Washington, Upton Sinclair, and Fredrick Douglass. Titles include Moby Dick, Fanny Hill, Frankenstein, The Heart of Darkness, and Marie: the wrong of a woman.

We continually searching the web and other resources to aid in this goal. In today's world where our public libraries are suffering from the lack of funds, it has become imperative to preserve our history and to protect literacy. Help us by joining us and the millions of other people to keep the spirit of reading alive.

Project BookRead is also an outlet whereby otherwise unpublished authors can reach a large audience. If you have an unpublished work, please contact us at BDarin AT tanaya DOT net. All works must be free to the public. We do not charge royalties and there is no fee. This is a non-profit ministry.

Project BookRead will NOT publish any material promoting pornography, illegal activities, or works promoting racism, hatred, or other anti-social behavior. With much of our history filled with such items, we inspect each work on a individual basis with regards to historical literary content. We welcome any submission, and very few are not published.

When we started BookRead, the concept of an e-book was non-existent. Now, they are everywhere. BookRead was part of a revolution, a new era in literacy awareness. In the sixteen years BookRead has operated, it has undergone many changes. When BookRead was first started, it catered to the visually impaired through a method I developed called AdTech (short for Adaptive Technologies).

AdTech was a algorithm or method that would take text and enlarge it by eight times its normal size. Now-a-days, changing text size is nothing more then a click, but back then, it was a major undertaking. BookRead started in the world of DOS (Disk Operating System) and BBSes (Bulletin Board Systems).

Yes, there was a time where the dial-up modem was the way the world communicated, a time before the Internet and Windows. As I stated above, BookRead was a part of a revolution. Its success went beyond anything I could imagine and now, a victim of its own success. A quick search in Google yields a staggering one hundred and twenty six million pages on e-books.

I'm not going to say BookRead started the revolution, but it was a major player in the game and a part of my life for many, many years. I can remember quite a few all-night sessions spent working on code and getting books ready to go online.

For posterity and as a final epitaph to Project BookRead, I will be slowly migrating all of the seventeen hundred and fifty plus books to this blog as articles. Some will be just a single post, while others will take multiple posts.

With that being said, the time has come to bid farewell to an old friend and close this chapter in history...