This is exciting. It’s one of those deceptive ones, since it looks pretty plain and doesn’t peacock itself out to passersby. But you know what they say: Don’t judge a website by its graphics, or maybe I made that up. Project Gutenberg is one of those things that I should have known about years ago, but only stumbled upon accidentally, and only recently.

I was looking for Mark Twain’s travel log of 19th century Palestine, “Innocents Abroad,” so I went to this old bookstore, one of those dusty places that has old newspapers so you can see what happened 70 years ago while bathing in that wafting old-newspaper aroma, which is never gratuitous, at least for people who like strange smells. Though I found a 19th century Russian printing of the Pentateuch, I couldn’t find Twain’s travel book. So I asked this tall guy who seemed to work there, and he told me, besides ordering it at the front desk, to check out Project Gutenberg. So I did.

And, as a southerner would say, well Gahhhh-ly. I typed in “Innocents Abroad” and found many, many versions of this book. Basically, anything that is no longer copyrighted, like older books that you had to read in high school, you can find them here. So no, you can’t exactly go to the Gutenberg project and pick up J.K. Rowling’s 8th installment “Harry Potter Finally Sees a Shrink After Suffering PTSD From Way Too Many Near-Death Experiences,” or any of the other seven, but what you can do is look up Arthur Conan Doyle and start reading up on Sherlock Holmes. As far as I know, the Doyle estate can’t stop the Project.

There are a few options for reading Gutenberg material. You can just browse it online without downloading by following the links, or you can download the actual eBook. You’ll need some supporting programs for some of these, which can be easily downloaded (most browsers search for them automatically). Project Gutenberg could use a more user-friendly interface in terms of making access to that a bit easier, but with the amount of stuff they’ve got in there, I really have no right to complain. With the right funding, this could turn into a serious research and money-saving powerhouse. Now you don’t have to go to the classics section of Borders and whip it $9.95 for another copy of Huckleberry Finn for your 8th grade son who doesn’t even want to read it anyway, that ungrateful brat with no appreciation for American classics by men who didn’t even use their own names—which is how it’s SUPPOSED to be. After all, who needs a name when you can just make up another one free of charge?

And of course, there are many ways to search. Author, title, topic, standard stuff. The only thing you have to worry about, is do you want to read off your computer, or use a lot of ink?

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 9th, 2009 at 2:51 pm and is filed under Reviews, Verticals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.