Classic novels as PDF for reMarkable and Kindle Scribe: Monte Cristo and Ben-Hur with a notes band on every page

ARLing s. r. o. · 17 September 2026

The text, and what was not changed

Both texts come from Project Gutenberg as Plain Text UTF-8: ebook 2145, Ben-Hur by Lew Wallace, the original English text published by Harper and Brothers in New York in 1880, and ebook 1184, The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas with co-author Auguste Maquet, the anonymous English translation first published by Chapman and Hall in London in 1846, as reprinted in a later nineteenth-century edition with short editorial footnotes. Both records say "Public domain in the USA"; Dumas died in 1870, Maquet in 1888 and Wallace in 1905, and in the EU and Slovakia economic rights last 70 years after the author's death, or 70 years from publication for an anonymous work, so both are in the public domain here as well.

The sequence of words in the PDF equals the sequence of words in the body of the Gutenberg file, and two scripts check that: one at download and one in the finished PDF. What is omitted is the Gutenberg header and footer, the opening block with title, author and the Contents list, and the lines carrying illustration file names. Line breaks are reflowed, words marked with underscores in the transcription are set in italics and the common indentation of multi-line blocks is removed; the spelling and punctuation of the transcription are kept, and nothing is added, cut or modernised.

One thing about the source deserves saying plainly. The Project Gutenberg licence allows anyone to copy and build on a work that is unrestricted in the United States as long as all references to Project Gutenberg are removed; a work that keeps them may be sold only with a royalty of 20 percent of gross profits. That is why the PDF on sale contains no words Project Gutenberg, the edition page speaks of a public-domain digital transcription, and the source with ebook number, URL and sha256 is recorded in our README, in the manifest and in the listing outside the work.

How the page is set

The text is ARLing Serif at 13 pt on an 18 pt line, 22 lines to a page, with no hyphenation; measured on 17 September 2026, 13 pt gives an average of 64 characters per line. An 8 mm head carries the chapter label and title. At the foot is a 33 mm band for notes with the pen, with a dotted line, and under it an 8 mm footer with the Contents link, a 7.5 mm row for a finger, and the page number. The contents has a link to every chapter and part, 8.8 mm per entry, with a long title on two lines; a diagram is always whole on one page; nothing is below 10 pt. The fonts are embedded as Type0 from static instances, Source Serif 4 and Schibsted Grotesk under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, with 0 Type3 fonts.

The A4 and US Letter files carry the same 139 x 194 mm block centred on the sheet, so the pages, the page numbers and the links are the same in all three files. The links are ordinary links in HTML, and Chrome keeps them when it prints to PDF, as Link annotations with a destination inside the same file.

What the finished files measure

Ben-Hur is one file of 948 pages, 8 books and 81 chapters, with 1039 internal links and 91 link targets, 0 dead links, 0 pages with overflow and 2 diagrams whole on their page. The text of all 81 chapters in the e-ink PDF was verified word by word against the data. The e-ink file is 7.3 MB, the A4 file 7.31 MB and the US Letter file 7.28 MB, decimal megabytes. The free sample is the first 3 chapters: 25 pages, 31 links, 0.19 MB.

The Count of Monte Cristo is issued in 5 volumes following the five parts of the source, each with its own title page, edition page and contents: 476, 521, 501, 412 and 364 pages, 2274 pages in all, 117 chapters, 2407 internal links and 133 link targets, 0 dead. The e-ink volumes are 3.7, 4.13, 3.98, 3.27 and 2.86 MB. For the shop there are three ZIP archives of 5 PDFs each, e-ink 17.94 MB, A4 17.96 MB and US Letter 17.9 MB, each under the 20 MB cap per file. The free sample is the first 3 chapters: 51 pages, 57 links, 0.41 MB. The 30 editorial footnotes of the source are the last section of volume 5.

Getting a file onto the reader is the same as with any other book: download it on a computer or phone and copy it over with the reMarkable desktop or mobile app, Send to Kindle for the Scribe, or a USB cable and the device folder for Boox. Nothing is installed and no account of ours is needed.

What we have not verified

No file has been opened on a physical reMarkable, Kindle Scribe, Boox or Supernote; the links, the notes band and the page counts are measured in the PDF only. The Etsy listings, 4.90 € per title in the ARLingPuzzles shop, are prepared and not uploaded, and the listing images are still missing. The Etsy limits we work to, 140 characters in the title, 13 tags of 20 characters, 5 files and 20 MB per file, and the acceptance of a ZIP as a digital file, are from memory, because help.etsy.com could not be read. The few Greek words in Monte Cristo are set in a fallback system font.

Frequently asked questions

Where the books are

Classics for e-ink are sold as digital downloads in our Etsy shop for 4.90 € per title, once the listings are uploaded. Our other titles for the same page size are on the puzzle books page: ten printable puzzle books of 100 puzzles each, 4.90 € a book.