Printing - You can usually print these in half size without any problem, since the originals were about that size anyway. (When printing these PDFs, they seem to work best if you change "Page Scaling" to say: "Fit to Printable Area" so the image fills the page. Of course, this might vary from one book to another, so see what looks best before printing.)
Text option - Uncorrected OCR text is usually available as well as the PDFs or scans. (See below)
Scan Color - Most online scans (like at Google Books [GB], MOA, Canadiana, etc.) are crisp black and white. But the PDF scans at the Internet Archive [IA] are sometimes yellowed and may print a grey background, but there is a way around that (and they are beginning to have more b & w available there.)

Quick-Fix for Yellow Scans - Once the IA file is downloaded and opened in Adobe, look at the row of tabs at the far left. Click the one that says "layers". Click on the picture of the eye next to where it says "Background" and it will get rid of the colored background for you. (Pretty slick, eh?) The text and b & w pictures come out very well. Colored pictures need the background turned back on, but most books have b & w pictures anyway.

[I did a book with colored pics as follows: I printed different sections of the book at a time (pages without pictures) to FinePrint, so all the text pages ran together. (It combines all of the jobs for you.) After printing those I turned the background back on and printed the pictures on toner saver in b & w, then inserted into the book. (Many old books have a blank page after the picture page, and often they are without numbers, so it works out perfectly.)]

Uncorrected OCR text   Sample: The Story Girl

What's OCR anyway? A technology that "reads" a scanned page and translates it into text. It's not a perfect science, but usually works pretty well. I've linked to these only as a last resort, because I'm a perfectionist and don't like so many errors. (Those listed as uncorrected OCR are also available at the same link as scanned images, or PDFs of scanned images. IA's OCR texts seem to download faster than those at GB.)

What isn't corrected? Remember that everything that was on the original page becomes part of the text. If the title of the book, or chapter, was written at the top of each page, then that title will show up in the text everywhere a new page started. And the page numbers get thrown in too. These stand out pretty well and can be easily deleted, but that can be a pain with a large book. (Or you could just ignore the page numbers.) Sometimes the OCR translates things incorrectly and you will get strange typos, or extra blank spaces here and there.

Usually you can still tell what the text is supposed to say, even if it has typos. The table of contents will be the worst part, so scroll down to the main content before you decided if it's acceptable to you.

When I get a bit of time, I hope to clean up some of the OCR texts I've linked to (at least those on the RC and Henty lists), and provide them on my free files page. I'll make a note of it on the booklists when that happens, so you can have a nicer version. In the meantime, you can make the best of these OCR files, print from the scans, or use one of the substitute books I've suggested.


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