Today is the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens. He was born in Portsmouth, England on February 7, 1812, the second of eight children. When he was 12 years old his father was sent to debtors’ prison, along with most of his family, and Charles went to live with a friend of the family, an impoverished old lady. He was forced to quit school and work in a blacking factory, where he pasted labels on jars of shoe polish.

Dickens never forgot those early traumas. He incorporated his experiences and observations of social injustice into his works, including David Copperfield, Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol. (Find free novels below.) He was the most popular writer of Victorian England, a virtual rock star in the days before recorded music and movies. His stories, published serially in magazines, were eagerly awaited by the public. Most have remained in print ever since.

The Dickens bicentenary is being celebrated with special events around the world, including a wreath-laying ceremony this morning at Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, where actor and filmmaker Ralph Fiennes, author Claire Tomalin, and two of Dickens’s descendants are scheduled to give readings. For a listing of events today and throughout the year, go to Dickens2012.org. Also take a look at the short retrospective of Dickens-inspired movies (above) from the British Film Institute.

To help celebrate, we have gathered together some of the best Dickens material from across the Web:

Films (see our complete list of Free Movies):

• Great Expectations: The classic 1946 version directed by David Lean and starring John Mills, Bernard Miles, Finlay Currie, Jean Simmons, Martita Hunt and Alec Guinness. The film won Academy Awards for Best Art Direction and Best Cinematography.
• Oliver Twist: Another classic by David Lean, this 1948 film stars John Howard Davies as Oliver and Alec Guinness as Fagin. In 1999 it was ranked 46th on the BFI’s list of the top 100 British films of all time.
• A Tale of Two Cities: The 1958 film by Ralph Thomas, starring Dirk Bogarde as Sydney Carton and Dorothy Tutin as Lucie Manette. The film was shot in France’s Loire Valley, with several thousand U.S. soldiers, posted in nearby Orleans, cast as extras.
• A Christmas Carol: George C. Scott gives an excellent performance as Ebenezer Scrooge in this critically acclaimed 1984 film directed by Clive Donner. It premiered in America on CBS television, and was released theatrically in Great Britain.
• David Copperfield: A 2000 U.S.-Irish television adaptation starring Hugh Dancy as David Copperfield, Michael Richards as Wilkins Micawber and Sally Field as Betsey Trotwood.
• The Pickwick Papers: A 1952 film, adapted and directed by Noel Langley and starring James Hayter as Samuel Pickwick.

eBooks (see our complete list of Free eBooks)

• A Christmas Carol – Read Online – Download Multiple Formats - Kindle
• A Tale of Two Cities – Read Online – Download Multiple Formats
• Bleak House – Read Online – Download Multiple Formats – Kindle
• David Copperfield – Read Online – Download Multiple Formats
• Great Expectations – Read Online – Download Multiple Formats –Kindle
• Hard Times – Read Online – Download Multiple Formats
• Mystery of Edwin Drood – Read Online – Download Multiple Formats
• Oliver Twist – Read Online – Download Multiple Formats - Kindle

Audio Books (see our complete list of Free Audio Books)

• A Christmas Carol – Free iTunes – Free MP3 Zip File
• A Tale of Two Cities – Free iTunes - Free MP3 Zip File
• A Collection of Christmas Stories - Free iTunes
• Bleak House – Free iTunes – Free MP3 Zip File
• David Copperfield – Free iTunes – Free MP3
• Great Expectations – Free iTunes – Free MP3 Zip File
• Hard Times – Free iTunes – Free MP3 Zip File
• Oliver Twist – Free iTunes – Free MP3

NOTE: If we’re missing a good Dickens novel, don’t forget Audible.com’s 14 day trial. It will let you download an audio book for free, pretty much any one you want, and they’re all narrated and produced in a professional format. Get details here.

Related Content:

Download 20 Popular High School Books Available as Free eBooks & Audio Books

Celebrate the 200th Birthday of Charles Dickens with Free Movies, eBooks and Audio Books is a post from: Open Culture

Then came another piece of news. Apple has released a new iTunesU app that lets students access enhanced university courses … for free. Once you download the app, you can select courses that combine audio/video lectures with supporting materials: books and articles (sometimes free, sometimes not), transcripts of lectures, exercises, slideshows, useful software and beyond. Some courses preloaded in the free app include:

American Revolution – Joanne Freeman, Yale
Colonial and Revolutionary America – Jack Rakove, Stanford
Core Concepts in Chemistry –  Stephen L. Craig, Duke
iPad and iPhone App Development – Paul Hegarty, Stanford

These courses now appear in our collection of 400 Free Online Courses, which aggregates free courses available on iTunes, YouTube, and the web.

Apple Releases Free iTunesU App & Enhanced University Courses (Plus Textbooks) is a post from: Open Culture

What better way to celebrate the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr.? Today, the King Center has made available online 200,000 papers belonging to the civil rights leader — the first step to bringing more than one million documents to the web. The documents give you a good glimpse of Dr. King’s role as a scholar, father, pastor and catalyst for change. And, among the papers, you will find “speeches, telegrams, scribbled notes, patient admonitions and urgent pleas.” Notable documents worth visiting include King’s 1964 Nobel Prize Acceptance Lecture, his Eulogy for the Four Girls Murdered in Birmingham (1963), a draft of his world-changing “I Have a Dream” speech, and much more.

Underwritten by JPMorgan Chase, the archive lets you navigate through documents by theme and by type of document. Or you can simply use a dedicated search engine. Once you find a document of interest, you can zoom into the content. But, I am not seeing a way to scroll up and down the enlarged pages — something that seriously limits your ability to read any given text. If I’m missing something please let me know in the comments below …

Related Content:

MLK’s Soaring “I Have a Dream” Speech, 1963

MLK’s Haunting “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” Speech, 1968

200,000 Martin Luther King Papers Go Online is a post from: Open Culture

On January 19th, Apple apparently plans to roll into The Guggenheim in New York City and announce plans to disrupt the textbook market. Big news? Maybe. But let’s not lose sight of another Guggenheim digital initiative.

In recent days, the museum has made 65 art catalogues available online, all free of charge. The catalogues offer an intellectual and visual introduction to the work of Alexander Calder, Edvard Munch, Francis Bacon, Gustav Klimt & Egon Schiele, and Kandinsky. Plus there are other texts (e.g., Masterpieces of Modern Art and Abstract Expressionists Imagists) that tackle meta movements and themes.

Now let me give you a few handy instructions to get you started. 1.) Select a text from the collection. 2.) Click the “Read Catalogue Online” button. 3.) Start reading the book in the pop-up browser, and use the controls at the very bottom of the pop-up browser to move through the book. 4.) If you have any problems accessing these texts, you can find alternate versions on Archive.org, which lets you download books in multiple formats – ePUB, PDF and the rest.

For more good reads, don’t miss our collection of Free eBooks.

Related Content:

MoMA Puts Pollock, Rothko & de Kooning on Your iPad

Google “Art Project” Brings Great Paintings & Museums to You

Jackson Pollock: Lights, Camera, Paint! (1951)

John Berger’s Ways of Seeing: The TV Series

Free: The Guggenheim Puts 65 Modern Art Books Online is a post from: Open Culture

If you’re not intimately familiar with his novels, then you assuredly know major films based on Dick’s work – Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly and Minority Report. Today, we bring you another way to get acquainted with his writing. We’re presenting a selection of Dick’s stories available for free on the web. Below we have culled together 11 short stories from our collection of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books. And, just as an fyi, you could always snag one of Dick’s novels (in audio) by signing up for Audible.com’s no-strings-attached Free Trial program. Get details here.

eTexts (find download instructions here)

• “Beyond the Door” – Multiple formats – iTunes
  • First published in 1954, the text is not usually found in collections of Dick’s writings.
• “Beyond Lies the Wub” – Multiple formats – iTunes
  • Dick’s first published story. Originally appeared in Planet Stories in July, 1952.
• “Mr. Spaceship” – Multiple Formats
  • Appeared first in Imagination in 1953, and later in The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick.
• “Piper in the Woods” – Multiple Formats
  • First published in 1953 in the fantasy and science fiction magazine, Imagination.
• “Second Variety” – Multiple Formats
  • Influential short story first published in Space Science Fiction Magazine in May 1953.
• “The Crystal Crypt” – Multiple Formats
  • Sci-fi story published in the January 1952 edition of Planet Stories.
• “The Defenders” – Multiple Formats – iTunes
  • A 1953 sci-fi story that laid the foundation for Dick’s 1964 novel The Penultimate Truth.
• “The Eyes Have It” – Multiple Formats – iTunes
  • One of the shortest, if not the shortest, of all of Philip K. Dick’s many short stories.
• “The Gun” – Multiple Formats – iTunes
  • A 1952 sci-fi story that later appeared in The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick.
• “The Skull” – Multiple Formats – iTunes
  • Same as right above.
• “The Variable Man” – Multiple Formats
  • A 1953 novella written/sold by Philip K. Dick before he had an agent.

Audio

• “Beyond Lies the Wub” – Free MP3
• “Beyond the Door” – Free MP3
• “Second Variety” – Free MP3 Zip File – Stream Online
• “The Defenders” - Free MP3
• “The Variable Man” – Free MP3 Zip File – Stream Online

P.S. Don’t miss the film Philip K. Dick: A Day in the Afterlife (1994), a documentary appearing in our collection of Free Movies Online.

Related Content:

Free: Isaac Asimov’s Epic Foundation Trilogy Dramatized in Classic Audio

Neil Gaiman’s Free Short Stories and New Year’s Wishes

The Ware Tetralogy: Free SciFi Download

Free Philip K. Dick: Download 11 Great Science Fiction Stories is a post from: Open Culture

Santa left a new Kindle, iPad or other media player under your tree. He did his job. Now we’ll do ours. We’ll tell you how to fill those devices with free intelligent media — great books, movies, courses, and all of the rest. And if you didn’t get a new gadget, fear not. You can access all of these materials on the good old fashioned computer. Here we go:

Free eBooks: You have always wanted to read the great works. And now is your chance. When you dive into our Free eBooks collection you will find 300 great works by some classic writers (Dickens, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare and Tolstoy) and contemporary writers (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, and Kurt Vonnegut). The collection also gives you access to the 51-volume Harvard Classics. Read these foundational texts, and you’ll be well on your way to giving yourself a proper liberal education.

If you need help loading files to your eBook reader, Project Gutenberg provides tutorials here, and one of our previous posts explains how to upload files specifically to your Kindle.

Free Audio Books: What better way to spend your free time than listening to some of the greatest books ever written? This page contains a vast number of free audio books, including works by Arthur Conan Doyle, James Joyce, Jane Austen, Edgar Allan Poe, George Orwell and more recent writers — Italo Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov, Raymond Carver, etc. You can download these classic books straight to your mp3 player, then listen as you go.

[Note: If you're looking for a more recent book, you can download one free audio book from Audible.com. Grab that new Steve Jobs biography, or pretty much any other audio book you want. Find details on Audible's no-strings-attached deal here.]

Free Courses: This list brings together over 400 free courses from leading universities, including Stanford, Yale, MIT, UC Berkeley, Oxford and beyond. These full-fledged courses range across all disciplines – history, physics, philosophy, psychology and beyond. All of these courses are available in audio, and roughly 65% are available in video. You can’t receive credits or certificates for these courses. But the amount of personal enrichment you will derive here is immeasurable.

Free Movies: With a click of a mouse, or a tap of your touch screen, you will have access to 435 great movies. The collection hosts many classics, westerns, indies, documentaries, silent films and film noir favorites. It features work by some of our great directors (Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Andrei Tarkovsky, Stanley Kubrick, Jean-Luc Godard and David Lynch) and performances by cinema legends: John Wayne, Jack Nicholson, Audrey Hepburn, Charlie Chaplin, and beyond. On this one page, you will find thousands of hours of cinema bliss.

Free Language Lessons: Perhaps learning a new language is high on your list of 2012 New Year’s resolutions. Well, here is a great way to do it. Take your pick of 40 languages, including Spanish, French, Italian, Mandarin, English, Russian, Dutch, even Finnish, Yiddish and Esperanto. These lessons are all free and ready to download.

Free Textbooks: And one last item for the lifelong learners among you. We have scoured the web and pulled together a list of 150 Free Textbooks. It’s a great resource particularly if you’re looking to learn math, computer science or physics on your own. There might be a diamond in the rough here for you.

Thank Santa, maybe thank us, and enjoy that new device….

Fill Your New Kindle, iPad, iPhone with Free eBooks, Movies, Audio Books, Courses & More is a post from: Open Culture

Neil Gaiman is one of the handful of writers who has made comics respectable over the past several decades. He has written some classic children’s stories, plus a novel that will be adapted by HBO. A great deal of his output, though, has been in the form of short stories, and we have pulled together some free copies for you today. Some stories are available in audio and video, others in text. (We have them all separately listed in our collections of Free Audio Books and eBooks):

Audio & Video

And, since it’s certainly timely, we leave you with Gaiman’s New Year’s Eve message delivered to a crowd in Boston several years ago:

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art – write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. May your coming year be a wonderful thing in which you dream both dangerously and outrageously.

I hope you will make something that didn’t exist before you made it, that you will be loved and you will be liked and you will have people to love and to like in return. And most importantly, because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now – I hope that you will, when you need to, be wise and that you will always be kind. And I hope that somewhere in the next year you surprise yourself.

Mark Linsenmayer runs the Partially Examined Life philosophy podcast and blog. He also performs with the Madison, WI band New People.

Neil Gaiman’s Free Short Stories is a post from: Open Culture

A Reddit.com user posed the question to Neil deGrasse Tyson: “Which books should be read by every single intelligent person on the planet?”

Below, you will find the book list offered up by the astrophysicist, director of the Hayden Planetarium, and popularizer of science. Where possible, we have included links to free versions of the books, all taken from our Free Audio Books and Free eBooks collections. Or you can always download a professionally-narrated book for free from Audible.com. Details here.

If you’re looking for a more extensive list of essential works, don’t miss The Harvard Classics, a 51 volume series that you can now download online.

1.) The Bible (eBook) - “to learn that it’s easier to be told by others what to think and believe than it is to think for yourself.”

2.) The System of the World by Isaac Newton (eBook) – “to learn that the universe is a knowable place.”

3.) On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (eBook – Audio Book) - “to learn of our kinship with all other life on Earth.”

4.) Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (eBook – Audio Book) – “to learn, among other satirical lessons, that most of the time humans are Yahoos.”

5.) The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine (eBook – Audio Book) – “to learn how the power of rational thought is the primary source of freedom in the world.”

6.) The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith (eBook – Audio Book) - “to learn that capitalism is an economy of greed, a force of nature unto itself.”

7.) The Art of War by Sun Tsu (eBook – Audio Book) - “to learn that the act of killing fellow humans can be raised to an art.”

8.) The Prince by Machiavelli (eBook – Audio Book) - “to learn that people not in power will do all they can to acquire it, and people in power will do all they can to keep it.”

Tyson concludes by saying: “If you read all of the above works you will glean profound insight into most of what has driven the history of the western world.”

He has also added  some more thoughts in the comments section below, saying:

Thanks for this ongoing interest in my book suggestions. From some of your reflections, it looks like the intent of the list was not as clear as I thought. The one-line comment after each book is not a review but a statement about how the book’s content influenced the behavior of people who shaped the western world. So, for example, it does no good to say what the Bible “really” meant, if its actual influence on human behavior is something else. Again, thanks for your collective interest. -NDTyson

H/T goes to Galley Cat

Related Content:

Stephen Colbert Talks Science with Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson

50 Famous Academics & Scientists Talk About God

Neil deGrasse Tyson Stars in New Symphony of Science

The Harvard Classics: A Free Digital Collection

450 Free Courses Online

Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists 8 (Free) Books Every Intelligent Person Should Read is a post from: Open Culture

It’s not just any ebook. Based on the 1968 film, this ebook features animated illustrations, 14 video clips from the original film, audio functionality that magically turns the book into an audio book, and various interactive elements. You can “read” the book (download it here) on any iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. Our apologies in advance if you use other devices.

The Yellow Submarine will be added to our collection of Free eBooks, which features 250 classics, including texts by Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Joyce, Nabokov, Austen, Nietzsche and others. Also don’t miss our equally large collection of Free Audio Books.

Related Content:

The Beatles’ Rooftop Concert: The Last Gig

Jimmy Page Tells the Story of Kashmir

The Beatles Complete on Ukulele

Download The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine as a Free, Interactive eBook is a post from: Open Culture

Between 1968 and 1972, Stewart Brand published The Whole Earth Catalog. For Kevin Kelly, the Catalog was essentially “a paper-based database offering thousands of hacks, tips, tools, suggestions, and possibilities for optimizing your life.” For Steve Jobs, it was a “Bible” of his generation, a life -transforming publication. Speaking to Stanford graduates in 2005, in what Ken Auletta has called the “Gettysburg Address of graduation-speechism,” Jobs explained why he drew inspiration from this intellectual creation of the 60s counterculture:

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

The good news is that The Whole Earth Catalog and some related publications are available online. You can read them for free, or download them for a fee. We suggest diving in right here, in Fall 1968, where it all begins. Enjoy….

Note: If you’re having problems find your way around the site, check out the Twitter stream for the The Whole Earth Catalogue. It includes links to various online editions. We’ve also added the text to our collection of Free eBooks.

The Whole Earth Catalog Online: The “Bible” of Steve Jobs’ Generation is a post from: Open Culture