Litrix Reading Room is edited by Stan Jones, a mystery novelist and book-lover in Anchorage, Alaska. (This is why the Reading Room devotes a section to the literature of the North.)

All books in the Reading Room are either out of copyright or the copyright holder has allowed free electronic distribution. That's how we can provide them free of charge to readers.

Someday, we hope also to make just-published commercial books available in the Reading Room, but that presumably will require the development of some mechanism for paying the publishers -- either advertising support, or payments collected electronically from readers.

However, it is Litrix policy that public-domain works will always be free to guests of the Reading Room. And we hope that the economics of the Internet will develop in such a way that just-published books can also be made available free to readers with advertising support.

The out-of-pocket costs of maintaining the Reading Room -- such as the fees we pay to the service that hosts Litrix -- are covered by our relationship with Amazon.Com, which works in two ways.

One way is that Litrix receives a small commission if you visit Amazon via a link on Litrix and then buy a book or other product from Amazon.

The other way is through donations, handled by the Amazon Honor System. If you can help, please support Litrix in this way so that we can continue to expand our offerings and remain free.

Or, if you prefer to donate directly, you can send me a check at the address below. (Please make your check out to me personally, Stan Jones, not to Litrix, as Litrix at present is such a humble enterprise that it doesn't even have its own bank account!)

Some of the books Litrix makes available online are also available in special Litrix print editions.

Credit Where Credit's Due

The raw texts for Litrix books come from a host of different collections and archives, but special thanks go to the Gutenberg Project.

In addition, my friend and fellow book-lover, contributing editor Robert Raven, merits recognition for his often-heroic efforts to find obscure but classic texts on the Internet and, when that fails, to input them himself!

If:

* You have a suggestion for improving the Reading Room,
* You want to request a specific book be made available,
* You find a work on the Reading Room that is still in copyright, or
* You have a complaint or question about the Reading Room,

please contact me by regular mail, or by email to Editor (at) Litrix (dot) com. (Sorry for the weird way of writing the email address. It's done to defeat the address harvesting robots used by spammers.)

And what about my mystery novels? They are set in Chukchi, a fictional Eskimo village in the Alaskan Arctic, and feature an Eskimo state trooper named Nathan Active. The first, "White Sky, Black Ice," was published in May 1999. If you are interested, you can find an excerpt right here on Litrix. The second, "Shaman Pass," was published in May 2003. You can find an excerpt here. And, of course, you can read reviews of the two novels and purchase them through our links to Amazon.Com. If you want to know more, you can visit the web site I set up for my books: sjbooks.com.  Happy reading!

Stan Jones

Litrix Reading Room
Box 240264
Anchorage, Alaska 99524-0264