diff --git a/MANIFEST.in b/MANIFEST.in
index 18a513a1919e35c6dd671474cc962510afba7e23..c77bb72b660652cf0870a4fa5a25432617e79cf7 100644
--- a/MANIFEST.in
+++ b/MANIFEST.in
@@ -2,7 +2,7 @@
 # in addition to the default ones.
 
 include MANIFEST.in
-include INSTALL LICENSE AUTHORS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS TODO
+include INSTALL LICENSE AUTHORS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS TODO README_WINDOWS.txt
 
 # We explicitly include both pyx and c files, so that both are shipped in
 # source tarballs independently of whether "setup.py sdist" is run with
diff --git a/README_WINDOWS.txt b/README_WINDOWS.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..d6d8833acdb0800db5d9c7ef5ed8287ef0a3d057
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README_WINDOWS.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,6 @@
+A note for users of Microsoft Windows
+-------------------------------------
+
+To read the text files in this directory (README, LICENSE, INSTALL, etc.),
+right-click, choose "Open", and open with "WordPad".  ("Notepad" will not
+display the files properly.)