Thursday, February 14, 2008

ebooks

Sorting through some old files, I came across a small ebook I'd downloaded from the Gutenberg Project called "The Simple Life" by Charles Wagner. Skimming through it, this phrase caught my eye: "It is not the woman with one dress who asks most insistently how she shall be clothed, nor is it those reduced to the strictly necessary who make most question of what they shall eat to-morrow."

Food for thought, isn't it?

If you want to download Gutenberg Project's books, it's fast to do in text form - you don't need a reader or a browser. If you can't read it all at one setting in a text editor, make your own bookmark simply by typing a few characters that you'll remember, then finding them next time by using the built in find function. I use ?!? because it's quick, easy to type and you hardly ever find it in the text of a book otherwise.

There are other free sources of books online - notably the Internet Public Library. IPL has links to some very good reading, well organized so you can find your interests quickly.

While reading on a monitor can be tiresome, it's the next best thing to a trip to the library. If you haven't looked for free books online, you'l be pleasantly surprised at the quantity and variety available.

You just can't get much more frugal than free.

2 comments:

  1. Great links. I'm familiar with the Gutenberg Project, but not the IPL. Another good source for online works is Classical Reader.

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  2. Thanks for the link! I've found several places through Google (just looking for "free books online"), but hadn't come across that one.

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