About Us
What is Girlebooks?
Much more than a simple ebook resource, Girlebooks aims to make classic and contemporary works by female writers available to a large audience through the ebook medium. The site was founded by Laura McDonald and her mom Joyce McDonald with lots of help by volunteers and contributing bloggers.
Why books by women?
We love books by both men and women. However, if we may generalize, women's most loved and re-read books are generally books by other women. The same is probably true for men. Also, as women authors were not always as celebrated and promoted as they are today, we are digging up many forgotten books that that we believe deserve a wider audience than they have.
What is different about your ebooks?
You can get ebooks in lots of places on the internet, but our ebooks are hand-crafted and professionally formatted. Each ebook has a linked table of contents and text reflow for small reading devices. We create covers, correct errors introduced by digital conversion, and offer the ebooks in multiple formats to accommodate most ebook reading devices. All of our ebooks, even the ones in the ebook store, are DRM free (no digital rights management). This means that once you download the ebook, it is yours forever.
Where do you get the book texts?
We usually use texts from Project Gutenberg. We have also started our own proofreading initiative.
Can I help out in any way?
Yes! If you would like to volunteer your time proofreading texts for inclusion in our free ebook catalog as well as Project Gutenberg's catalog, read more about our proofreading initiative. You may also make a small donation toward website server costs.
How do you make your book covers?
We make many of our book covers using images from public domain paintings and illustrations. Recently we have started using original artwork by Janice Tarver for our ebook cover art. Most of this artwork is for sale at Janice's Etsy store.
Can I publish my ebook on Girlebooks?
Girlebooks offers three options for authors seeking to offer their works on our website. Please see our For Authors page for more details.
How did you create this website?
While this site is my passion, my day job is making websites for others through my website business Dynabytes.com. This site was made using Wordpress and a highly customized magazine theme. Ebook download management is handled by the Drain Hole plugin. Ebook ratings are provided by the WP-PostRatings plugin. The ebook store is run by the very cool eShop plugin.
If you have any other questions please let us know!