Thursday 24 March 2011

Project Gutenberg - Free Ebook Paradise


I have posted a few book reviews that link back to a website called Project Gutenberg and felt I wanted to actually share some information about this superb website.

Basically, Project Gutenberg was started in 1971 and it is the largest collection of free eBooks with over 40,000 now available for download. The majority of the eBooks within the collection are full texts of various public domain books, this generally means literature from the first quarter of the twentieth century and earlier. Whilst Amazon for example still charges you for a lot of these public domain books, Project Gutenberg doesn't charge a thing. You can go along to the website and download works by Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, HG Wells, William Shakespeare and many others! As for Ebook formats, they cover Kindle, Epub, HTML and other plain Text formats so hopefully all you should be able to read them if you have an Ebook Reader.

This was one of the first sites I found after buying a Kindle and it has opened my eyes to quite a lot of “classic” literature I have never thought about buying or reading before. For example, I downloaded the full Sherlock Holmes collection from here and have been enjoying them hugely. In my opinion it is one of the big selling points for Ebooks in that Public Domain novels such as these can be obtained for free as there is no costs for manufacture etc. as there is when we get printed versions of these books.

Anyway, I advise any of you with an Ebook reader to go along to the website and give it a look over. If there are classic books you have always wanted to read then look them up there and give them a chance.

Also, if any of you have been using Project Gutenberg yourself then let me know what books you have downloaded and read from there that you may never have done previously.

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