Freebie Friday: Project Gutenberg RSS

Project Gutenberg is a great source of free e-books. They've been around for a long time. I remember in the mid-1980s when my dad had a CompuServe account and he downloaded a book from Project Gutenberg. The thing was, he downloaded it to his storage space on CompuServe's hard disk (I'm not even sure if our computer had a hard disk). When he got his monthly bill, he had a charge of a couple of hundred dollars for the use of the disk space. (He was able to talk his way out of it.)

Project Gutenberg now has 17,000 e-books available for free download now. The top 100 list for a good place to start exploring. PG's e-books are plain ASCII, but in recent years, they've started offering human-read MP3s of books (like The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes), a utility to convert e-books to the Plucker format (for Palm handhelds) on the fly, and movies and still photos.

I usually read Gutenberg texts on my Palm by converting them to the Palm document format with an excellent donation-ware utility for Mac called Pordible.

I just started using PG's RSS feed of recent eBooks, which is updated nightly, to see the list of new books that kind volunteers around the world have scanned in. There's a lot of great reading here -- you could stop buying books and just use PG as your free Amazon.com from now on. That is, if you don't mind not reading books published after 1923 (which, in most cases, are still under copyright in the US).