Does anyone have any good sources for simple children’s books in a digital format (preferably text)??  I already have most of the Gutenberg young adult books, but these are still a bit more complicated than one might offer a 4 year old.

When we learn to read, we generally start off with extremely simple books (See dog.  See dog run.  I do not like Green Eggs and Ham), and in time, we graduate to books with more complicated grammar.  I would like to mirror this in testing my learning algorithms, but need to find a good source for a large amount of simple text.  This would probably be helpful to many of us!

Regards,
John

Hey, John.

After doing a little bit of “constructive Googling”, I found these websites:

http://www.magickeys.com/books/ - Books for all ages, text, or text and audio, but with a lot of images, too.

http://www.childrenslibrary.org/icdl/SimpleSearchCategory?ilang=English - Different age levels here, as well as a respectable number of languages besides English The interesting thing here is that most (if not all) of the books here seem to be digital scans of actual books, some of them VERY old, indeed. Thus, mostly images, rather than text.

http://bygosh.com/kidsstories.htm - Classic children’s stories in English, with a few images tossed in to make it interesting. Only a small number of stories here, but they’re all considered (here in the States, at least) to be classics.

Hopefully, this is enough to at least get you started. Let me know if this helps.

That’s a really good question John, and some really good leads Dave.

I’ve been trying to track down resources like that too, but haven’t found much outside of Project Gutenberg either.

Thanks for help on the search!

I’m still hoping to stumble upon some treasure trove of millions of lines of “easy reader”/“children’s” books in plain text form (or a format easily convertible to plain text), but I suppose I’ll just start compiling the smaller libraries that I (and others) can find.

If the search is successful, I’ll certainly make the compilation available to anyone else who might be interested in it.

Regards,
John

I think you will find some interesting material here. It’s a list of free e-books in plain text for educational purposes . You will find all the reading levels so you just need to choose what you need.

http://education-portal.com/articles/Free_Books_-_50_Places_to_Find_Free_Books_Online.html

Well, that’s my lttle contribution and as Dave said, let us know about your progress

As a non-English native as well, I think John is looking for those childrens books which are very obvious to US/UK cultures. For example, in Holland ‘Pinkeltje’, ‘Jip & Janneke’ and’Nijntje’. Everybody knows these children books, but if you would Google for ‘Childrens books’ they will not come up on top, just because Google has started its index in 1998. And children don’t make hyperlinks, so pages are not considered as important, though read very often.

What top 10 childrens books/characters would you note from your youth?

John

Well, I am not sure if the first site I’ve sent covers all your needs. So I took another Google research using criteria in my language first and after tried the same in English. So try “toddlers books” and “kindergarten books” as Google Keys.

http://www.astrop.net/KIDEBOOKS/INDEX.htm ( they are not for free but very affordable)
http://www.childrensbooksforever.com/ ( this site is for free)

http://www.google.com.br/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=kindergarden+e-books#hl=pt-BR&sa=X&ei=l0HvTozPB8r0gAemt4HsCA&ved=0CBoQvwUoAQ&q=kindergarten+e-books&spell=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.,cf.osb&fp=c06917eee5876c0a&biw=959&bih=624  ( in this list take a special view in http://www.clarkness.com/) - I think it’s what you are need to start.