fantasy libraries online: project gutenberg

Project Gutenberg is the granddaddy of them all. It started in 1971 at the University of Illinois, which is logical, as the U. of I. was the home of PLATO and touch screens and chat rooms and pretty much the general turn-of-the-millennium internet world except twenty to thirty years earlier. Now there are tens of thousands of public domain and creative commons e-books, and even some audio books.

One fantasy-library-like aspect of this site is that it allows for serendipity more than many online databases. You can search for specific items but you can also wander through the stacks browsing the catalog by title, author, category, or language (yes, there are lots of 'em). Or put in a key word in the search blank and browse by subject. Title and author browsing are true browsing -- you get a page with all the authors or titles beginning with your chosen letter, so you scan stroll -- uh, scroll -- around and see what's on nearby "shelves." Besides the obvious classics, there are pop-culture items, eyewitness testimonies of times past, and all sorts of odd and esoteric items in the shadowy nooks.

Project Gutenberg is truly free -- no money, no advertisements, no strings attached, no sign-ins or other hoops to jump through. And you can download the books and truly own your copies until your flash drive or computer burns out.

http://www.gutenberg.org/

more free e-books online (if you're australian)

For my Australian readers, Project Gutenberg Australia and Free Read make available books that are in public domain in Australia, but are not available on the main Project Gutenberg site because of the United States' ludicrously controlling copyright laws. These would include many classics from the early 20th century.

Note: These books are only legal for people residing in Australia or other countries where public domain begins fifty years after an author's death. For people living in the United States, or other countries which have legally determined that authors may need their royalties even after they've been mouldering in the grave much longer, it is illegal to download these books. I'm not a lawyer, so I can't even say whether it's legal for Americans to read them online.

However, if you feel like quietly protesting ridiculous copyright restrictions, go to your public library and check out a book by an author too dead to enjoy his or her royalties. It's completely free and legal.

e-books

I've been trying to give e-books a try, really I have. I can't justify paying the price of a dozen or so hardbacks for a machine to do what can be done for free with a lamp or a sunny window, but the library has e-books that can be read on a home computer and now there's a free Kindle reader for the iPhone.

Actually, I've been reading e-books since the early days of CD-ROMs. One of the earliest apps for the new (and at that time still very slow) format was a CD full of plain-text public domain works. And as any follower of this blog knows, I'm a big fan of Project Gutenberg. The difference with the new systems is that they include new books. And they scroll from side to side instead of up and down.

Supposedly, e-books are cheap, around ten bucks a pop. But that's not truly cheap to someone who remembers 65-cent paperbacks. For that matter, I strongly resist paying anything to read any book just once. I pay money for books I want to keep -- for the rest of my life, and be able to pass down to any great-grandkids I might have in the future. So for e-books I need to find modern books I'll want to read over and over, but only in the next few years. Or things I'd like to have a second, portable copy of. The problem is, every time I think of such a title, it turns out not to have an e-book version. Or it's one of the over-ten-dollars books.

The public library subscribes to netLibrary, which allows patrons to check out books to read on their home computers for a limited time. Sounds like a good deal, except that they have next to nothing I want to read even once -- except for public domain titles I can read at Gutenberg without the hassle of signing in, and download to keep for more than two weeks. Maybe I was doing something wrong, but browsing for books less than a year old brought up nothing at all, and I couldn't find any fiction, either.

So for now I'll go back to reading Poe's "The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaal" for free online.