Thursday, August 31, 2006

Downloading the Classics

I'll keep this one short, but wanted to draw your attention to an article my husband forwarded to me recently. Similar to Project Gutenberg, Google is now making thousands of classics available for downloading for free. Books whose copyrights have expired are considered public domain. Dickens, Shakespeare, and Dante are among those mentioned.

Could be worth a look...although there is something very appealing about an old-fashioned hardcover or paperback book that e-books just can't compete with. At least in my mind anyway :)

3 comments:

dancechica said...

Thanks for the heads up! Esp. nice to know since lately I've been reading/buying lots of classics. :-)

Carl V. Anderson said...

I just can't get into the idea of reading 'books' online. Not that I begrudge others as to me the most important thing is that people are reading. I just feel that the intimate act of reading is enhanced by being able to hold the volume in your hands. To see it, feel it, smell the ink and the paper. It is part of the magic of reading for me.

Christopher Willard said...

The project Gutenburg is a great way to search out a line in one of the classics that you just can't recall where it's from. (we all don't have the visual recall of Harold Bloom.) However reading more than a page on line something I find too tough to handle. I prefer crips pages, a warm light, the feel of paper, and margins in which to write my Fermat's Theorem.