English XXI

English XXI exists to make classical literature more available and appealing to the general public by modernizing the written English language and by publishing in eBook formats.

We don't condense books. What you get is the full text of the original book, but with the English modernized. We do our best to give you the full intent of the author's writing.

We also don't do books that are still under copyright. Generally speaking, books that are over about 90 years old are in the public domain and we can edit those to modernize the English.

Some people will probably disagree with us on this one, but we don't take out things which we (or others) might find objectionable. Often there are words in these books which I don't personally use, but I leave them as written. Fortunately, because these books are so old, the language is generally pretty mild compared to what we are exposed to now. Another thing is smoking. There are often references to smoking in older stories. Our modern knowledge tells us that smoking is a bad thing, but we have chosen (again) to leave these in the stories.

With XXI being the Roman number representation of 21 and this being the 21st century, our goal is to make older books available and interesting to 21st century readers.

There are a number of things that we look at to make this work:

There are many words which are no longer in common use
These are many words which have different meanings now
The way we now structure sentences is often different
References to other literature, which may have been well-known when written, may not be as widely known now

Click here to see some examples and a sample paragraph.

We would rather spend our time and energy on classic literature!