Sunday, June 04, 2006

Starting Today: 1/3 Million eBooks Free for a Month

Via physorg.com I found that Project Gutenberg and World eBook Library are offering, starting today, a third of a million eBooks downloadable for free for a month.

Project Gutenberg plans to repeat this World eBook Fair every year, increasing the number of books offered to 1,000,000 free books by the 2009 Fair.

I know that Project Gutenberg offers mainly public domain books, but I'm not sure what World eBook Library offers. Perhaps more current works?

This year's books are offered in over 100 languages.
See press release here.

Project Gutenberg has an admirable goal, to make such works as Shakespeare, Dickens and Bronte easily accessible. I know that I also may not have read certain books if they weren't available on their site.

For fun I looked at Project Gutenberg's Top 100 Downloads and was somewhat dismayed and somewhat happy to see that even there popular current themes are prevalent.

Here are yesterday's top ten downloads, of which I've only downloaded #6 and #9, although now I'm thinking of downloading #2 as well...

1. The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci - Complete by Leonardo da Vinci (648)
2. Kamasutra by Vatsyayana (455)
3. Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases by Grenville Kleiser (455)
4. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (336)
5. How to Speak and Write Correctly by Joseph Devlin (297)
6. The Art of War by 6th cent. B.C. Sunzi (277)
7. Forbidden books of the original New Testament by William Wake (260)
8. Aesop's Fables by Aesop (251)
9. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (245)
10. The Time Machine by H. G. Wells (228)

Categories: , ,

7 comments:

Anthony Rapino said...

Wanted to thank you for your comments on my flash story. I took a look around your site. Cool stuff. I'm going to add a link to this site on my blog.

Thanks again.

-Tony

Melly said...

My comment was well warranted.
Thanks Tony for yours :)
(And I'll linkback on my next template overhaul.)

Anonymous said...

I've downloaded several old ghost stories from the Gutenberg site. :) It's a treasure trove.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for sharing. I've never heard about this site. I'd better get busy downloading.

Melly said...

Deborah, isn't it?

Fred, welcome.
Don't worry about the Gutenberg site, their stuff is always there for free download.

Mal Smith said...

World eBook lists "only" the usual public domain classics on its shome page (and also obscure sci fi books which may be more recent). As they are PDF you may prefer the reading experience compared to Gutenberg's format - I much prefer Gutenberg's plain text & html files. They go through my XML parser much more readily.

Melly said...

LOL Mal, obscure sci fi. Actually, I'm not sure why it made me laugh.
I would love to know how you use your XML parser, I don't believe I know what it achieves.