Reading ebooks on FreeDOS with AMB

Can you read ebooks on FreeDOS? Yes, thanks to AMB, from Mateusz Viste. AMB stands for "Ancient Machine Book". It is an extremely lightweight file format meant to store any kind of hypertext documentation that may be comfortably viewed even on the most ancient PCs: technical manuals, books, etc. Think of it as a retro equivalent of a *.CHM help file.

You can download AMB and some sample AMB ebooks from Mateusz's website:

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Standard comment rules apply.

[The_Wandering_Nerd]

This reminds me of when I went to college in the mid-90s and I would download Project Gutenberg books, video game walkthroughs, and other interesting text files from the school computers and take them home to read on my ancient-even-for-the-times IBM AT in MS-DOS Edit. A hypertext/ebook system like this would have been very cool.

[NDHFilms]

This looks really good for reading technical documentation on DOS machines (manuals, ReadMes, etc). Once I get FreeDOS running on my ThinkPad butterfly laptop, I'll check it out. I'm not sure if I would use it to read a novel, but I would give it a try.

I'm currently working on an HTML-based e-book platform, maybe I can get that to work with Arachne in some way.

[kneekoo]

Cool! :) Not many books in the library, though, and there's no converter from other formats. It would've been nice to have a converter from epub, at least, or a friendlier way to make AMBs from text files. I didn't notice a navigation system, like prev/next. Did I miss that or there's none?

[jasonkenn]

Gonna have to give it a try looks interesting

[gpietsch]

I wonder what the Edlin page says. Jim danced around it in the video...

[haxxy]

Hi! Does it have a search function? I didn't hear you mention it. Thanks!