N today’s mobile society, it’s becoming far easier –and perhaps even more desirous– to bring Holmes with you in forms other than those derived from dead trees (as much a fan of dead trees as I am). We’ve already seen here how Old Time Radio shows can be snapped onto your iPod in a matter of minutes, but what about carrying the actual texts digitally?

While there are a number of online services that allow one to use a Palm or other PDA (personal data assistant) to download and read ebooks –that is, “electronic books” for those unfamiliar with the term– these are often rather expensive, with pricing approximately the same as published paper books. In the limited selection of classics available, this seems quite costly indeed, especially given that copyright has elapsed for most of them (there’s therefore no royalties to be paid), and there’s no physical materials or costs to pass long to the consumer.

Well, don’t fret, because many of the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle can be downloaded for free at Blackmask Online : Mystery/Arthur Conan Doyle. They have a variety of formats, including ones that can be opened in Adobe Acrobat, or a regular web browser (the “zipped” archives). But I love this site because of the various mobile formats, and in particular the files readable under Plucker or iSilo on my Palm. All I have to do is download, drag them to my install bucket, hit the button, and a few minutes later, I have dozens of works ready to go.

If this isn’t enough to satisfy your classic mystery fancies, you can also find Emile Gaboriau and his Lecoq, Sir Arthur’s brother-in-law E. W. Hornung and his gentleman cracksman Raffles, and Maurice Leblanc, who brought us Arsene Lupin.

If BlackMask doesn’t have what you’re looking for, try MemoWare, and do a search for “Conan Doyle”. There’s plenty of selections and formats there too, but I generally find a little more love and care in general goes into the BlackMask ebooks.

An added benefit of these ebooks, of course, is that you can take along books that are almost impossible to find in bookstores, even the online ones, with the possible exception of print-on-demand services and their variable quality. (Fans of ACD who have tried to track down the rare A Visit to Three Fronts or The Mystery of Cloomber can no doubt appreciate what I’m saying.)

One last word, regarding copyrights. In you live in the U.S., copyrights are still in force for those books published from 1923 onwards, so the act of downloading certain books (The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes is an example) is a violation under the Sonny Bono Act. If you live in the U.K., Canada (where I live), or most other countries which have signed the Berne Convention, the Conan Doyle copyrights expired as of 1980, and so downloading does not seem to be an issue. (At least, this is my understanding, but I am certainly not a lawyer: please let me know if you have legal evidence to the contrary.) For more information, see The Canon, the Copyrights, the Confusion.