The following links are to two different sites available to view Frances Hodgson Burnett's novel, The Secret Garden:
The Secret Garden Printed Text Online on Google Books
The Secret Garden Online Version available on PageByPage
The first link takes us to the actual printed version of The Secret Garden. The cover of Burnett's novel is shown as a picture of young Mary and Colin sitting together in the garden with birds and sqirrels sitting around them. Google makes it possible to read the story from the actual printed text, reading the exact words on each page as if the reader was holding the hard copy in his or her hands. By clicking forward arrows the reader is able to view the copyright page, title page, and content page before finally arriving at chapter one. Each page fits nicely on the screen and there is no need for scrolling.
I was pleased to see the printed version was available online. I liked how I could read every page of the book as if I had the novel in my hands. I think I enjoyed this from so much because I have always thought of reading literature as turning page by page, reading left to right, top to bottom. This is an example of printed literature digitized to be read on a computer, but is not considered to be electronic literature. This version of The Secret Garden would probabl be preferred by readers who - like me - are used to the "old" printed version texts. My only critique is that the book is that the pages never filled the entire screen. It was possible to zoom in and out of the pages, but the pages were held inside the Google books border. The downfall to the orginal print being used, an opportunity was lost to use images and color to help tell the story. The online readers were welcomed by the image of the cover, but then were bombarded with words for the remanider of the read. I often find staring at a computer screen with only lines of black and white letters can become extremely tedious. It may be more effective and enjoyable to have some visual representations scattered throughout the text.
The second link takes readers to a web page with the twenty-seven chapters bulleted for easy access to each chapter. The main page is a dull yellow background with the title and author's name at the top. If a chapter's link is clicked a new page is opened up, and the chapter is spread out across however many screens necessary to read the entire chapter. At the bottom of each page are tabs to move forward and backward through the chapter and it shows how many pages the chapter consists of.
This site has positive and negative characteristics as well. The text is larger and easier to read compared to the first online link, but is duller to the eye. Again there are no images to help tell the story, just simply words on a screen. I did like how there was no need for scrolling and the next page was one easy click away. Often times with a long screen of words, scrolling to more and more text can become overwhelming, and this site did a nice job of spreading out a very long text and making each chapter seems more managable.
I would also like to note the online representations of The Secret Garden may not be as glitzy and attractive as other more recent works of literature because it is such an old novel, being written in 1911 long before creation of the computer. I'm sure Frances Hodgson Burnett never dreamed her work would be read on a computer, and fact that the story is found in several different online forms speaks greatly about the quality of her writing. I think those who created these sites attempted to keep the work's print originality as a sort of respect for the author and to show the essence of literature at the time it was published.
