One thing I meant to mention (but forgot!) in the recent Reading for Boys post (posts passim) was the vast wealth of e-books available to read for free from one of the gems of the internet – Project Gutenberg.
Project Gutenberg was founded by Michael S. Hart, who died in 2011. Hart’s other claim to fame is as the inventor of the electronic book (or ebook). In Gutenberg’s early days, Hart is reputed to have produced many of the texts himself.
The aims of Project Gutenberg are to:
- Encourage the creation and distribution of ebooks;
- Help break down the bars of ignorance and illiteracy;
- Give as many ebooks to as many people as possible.
Gutenberg offers over 40,000 free ebooks in various formats – epub, Kindle, PDF, HTML, plain vanilla text, etc. – in 60 languages as at September 2011.
All the authors featured are out of copyright in the USA. Consequently, Gutenberg’s catalogue contains thousands of works in all fields: authors from ancient Greece and Rome, medieval literature, politics, philosophy, children’s literature and so on. If these are your desire, why pay the likes of Amazon for the privilege of acquiring a text that’s in the public domain when the same work is more than likely free of charge from Gutenberg or its partners and affiliates? Of course, Gutenberg accepts donations to support the work of its volunteers and keep the servers running.