From the TIMES ONLINE:
More than 65,000 19th-century works of fiction from the British Library’s collection are to be made available for free downloads by the public from this spring.
Owners of the Amazon Kindle, an ebook reader device, will be able to view well known works by writers such as Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy, as well as works by thousands of less famous authors.
You can read the rest about this Microsoft funded initiative here. In the meantime, we’ve made it relatively easy to download major classics to your Kindle, iPhone, smartphone or computer. See our collection of Free eBooks (and Audio Books).
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- Free eBooks for Your PC, iPhone, Kindle & Beyond
- Free Podcasts of Classic American and British Thrillers
- Library of Congress Adds 3,000 Photos to Flickr
Odd. “Bleak House” and “Pride and Prejudice” — two books cited in the article — are in the public domain (as are all the works of Dickens, Austen, and Hardy), and thanks to the tireless efforts of Project Guteneberg, have been available on the Kindle for years.
Sure, Brent, but it’s significant that one of the world’s great libraries is digitizing its own out-of-copyright holdings and making them readily available to remote readers. In the past, scholars have had to travel to places like the British Library to do research.
Those who do not yet read on a digital device can still benefit greatly from this sort of thing. My neighborhood bookstore has an Espresso Book Machine, which produces nice quality paperbacks in minutes while you watch. You can get long-out-of print books for a very reasonable price ($8 for any Google book or similar digital file from the public domain). It was featured on Open Culture earlier:
http://www.openculture.com/2007/08/the_fifteen_minute_book_machine.html
A list of book machine locations is here:
http://www.ondemandbooks.com/our_ebm_locations.htm
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