Downloading an e-book can be almost as easy as grabbing a book from the library shelf. As an example, let's download Edgar Allen Poe's short story, "The Black Cat".

• Log on to the Internet and go to Project Gutenberg at http://promo.net/pg.
  
  
• Type "Poe" in the Author window on the right, and click Search.
  
  
• Scroll the alphabetic list to find "The Black Cat," and then click that title. A page much like a card in a library card catalog will appear.
  
  
• Next to DOWNLOAD, you will see two choices: a "zip" file (poe2v10.zip), which requires you to have or download a program -- such as WinZip -- that will "unzip" the compressed file; and a text file (poe2v10.txt), which is larger, and therefore slower, to download, but also is usually easier to download as well.
  
  
• For this exercise, click poe2v10.txt to download the e-text of "The Black Cat." (Note the "vanilla text!")
  
  
• Read the legal or editing comments that precede the story.
  
  
• Click Edit>Select All and then click Edit>Copy.
  
  
• Open a new word processing document and click Edit>Paste.
  
  
• Save the document to a convenient location, so it will be available the next time you want students to read this short story!

Next: Using e-books!