The grandaddy of ebooks: Project Gutenberg
Once upon a time, I was very bored at work and decided to read George Eliot's Middlemarch. On my computer, so it wasn't quite so obvious I was reading for pleasure and not the newspaper.
While I enjoyed the somewhat long-winded tale, I felt I had somehow cheated. Yes, technically, I read the book. And it was free, thanks to the incomparable Project Gutenberg, but since I never held the words in my hand, I often forget that I ever saw the thing. Maybe that's my biggest problem with ebooks in general: It makes the experience thinner, somehow.
Regardless, Project Gutenberg is a great service, with thousands of books available for your perusal, at absolutely no cost, and they have made the text compatible with any number of PDAs and readers.
But as this BBC article explains, all is not right with the ebook world. With no clear picture of which readers will be left standing, it might be a good idea to keep a few old-fashioned books around.
Comments
I love Project Guttenberg, although (shame on me) I usually print the books out, in small font, so I can read them on the go. I DO recycle them afterward thought!
Posted by: Heather J. | August 19, 2008 4:00 PM
I discovered Project Gutenberg sometime near the beginning of college during a concerted effort at procrastination and have depended on it for distraction ever since. My favorite usage as of late has been to download a few novels onto my flash drive and to tote them around in that form. But I am still too partial to the physical form of a book to do all my reading that way. Plus, it's rather hard to lie on the couch and read from the computer.
Posted by: Abigail Carlson | August 19, 2008 6:53 PM