PROJECT GUTENBERG AUSTRALIA - FREE BOOKS!

This is the Australian branch of the Gutenberg Project, which owing to the differences between Australian and American copyright laws has a different selection of books to download.  But still all free, of course.

To my enormous pleasure I found the collected works of Thorne Smith and George Orwell here, both in their very different ways, authors I am extremely fond of, and that was only the start!

D.H. Lawrence, anyone?

As with the main Gutenberg site, one can help the Good Work along by joining them as a proof reader (details about this on the website), which I am planning to start doing quite soon, as I feel strongly that such projects should be supported by the reading public who make grateful use of their work.

As with the parent site, this is a treasure trove of wonderful books, and one from which I happily download books by authors I have never heard of, quite a surprising number of which turn out to be really enjoyable to read.

Well worth a visit........

SHARE WITH US:

If anyone of you has wandered happily around in this superb website, and have found any jewels among the books on offer and would care to share this, and their thoughts on the books they have found, I would be extremely pleased if they would share this with the rest of us by means of the Comments section here.

PROJECT GUTENBERG AMERICA - FREE BOOKS!

This American website is the most amazing source of copyright free (thus free!) books I have come across yet.  There are literally thousands of books here, in a multitude of languages too - English, French, German, Chinese and so on).

It is a project that has been going on for quite some time,, with the stated objective of putting every book they can find that is copyright free in America on-line.

Not only is this a very laudable project, but to make it even more fun, it is possible to join with them and help by proof reading books with them.  Details of how you do this are on their site.

Unlike most free download sites  for books, this one goes way beyond the usual selection of Dickens, Tolstoy and all the other old classics. Here you will find such jewels as The Art of War, George Orwell and almost any author you can think of who wrote more than 50 years ago.

Among other books I have also downloaded a whole series of rather strange science fiction magazines from about 1933 here, which are vastly entertaining, given their authors rather mistaken views about how the future (seen from their time) will be.  Surprisingly enough a lot of them are still very readable.  They also have books written relatively recently by authors you still find in any bookshop.

Navigation is simple and most of the books can be downloaded in a variety of formats, so whatever eReader you have (except for those tied to a proprietary format) you will be able to read them OK.

If they don't have the format you need, you can always download them as text files and then convert them to your format using a program such as Caliber (which I shall be reviewing very shortly).

I can't recommend this site enough, it has opened my eyes to all manner of writers who otherwise I would probably never have read - if a book is free, one can take risks is my simple approach.

So, go and check it out as soon as you can, I think you will be happily amazed at what you find there!  I was!

SHARE WITH US:

Once you have had a good wander around the book-stacks in this amazing library, and have found a book, or even a handful of books that really appealed to you, would you like to let us know about your finds?   We would really enjoy hearing about them if you felt like leaving a comment here telling us what you found and why you especially are pleased about your finds there.