project gutenburg - shameless plug

some members may already know of project gutenburg, but for those who dont, it is an online archive of downloadable literature.

after a certain amount of time, (usually anything from 50 - 70 years depending on the country), copyright on books expires and a great many of them have been added into the gutenburg collection.

for example, did you know you can download legally ebooks by...

sir arthur conan doyle
h g wells
lewis carroll
jane austin
mark twain
sigmund freud
franz kafka
oscar wilde
leonardo da vinci
jonathan swift
edgar allen poe
jules verne
friedrich wilhelm nietzsche
rudyard kipling
mary shelley

plus thousands of other authors. they now have over 18000 books available for download!!

do yourself a favour and pop over to www.gutenberg.org... and check it out

**end of shameless plug**

Thanks for this, justyc...

I'll have to check out the copyright laws in Canada for this.
I can see my printer is going to get hot. Good thing my wife can get paper on discount.

life gets better and better

Masqua, it's all public domain, basically. Odds are that if it's older than about 80 years, it's passed into the public. I know for sure Poe and Shelley are free to read, as is Nietzche. Burn up that printer.

DE

Thanks for the heads-up, Justyc!

That's definitely one for "Add to Favorites"

The best part being, with every year that goes by more and more will be added.

masqua My wife works for Staples, and she recently got 5 reams of laser printer paper for $.25 ea. yes, 25 measly cents per ream

Here's another one you might find interesting-
Free Metaphysical Books includng "The Master Key System" by Charles Haanel, which I'm pretty convinced the whole "What is the Secret" buzz is about.

There's a jackload of free ebooks out there on any variety of subjects. Happy searching.

Originally posted by masqua
I'll have to check out the copyright laws in Canada for this.

canadian copyright law (www.cb-cda.gc.ca...-33308) states...

"The term for which copyright shall subsist shall, except as otherwise expressly provided by this Act, be the life of the author, the remainder of the calendar year in which the author dies, and a period of fifty years following the end of that calendar year".

yeahright - that link does not work

I looked around and here appears to be a list of at least some of the PsiTek books, I could not get the site to work either. Sounds like an interesting sight, really would like to see it up and working.

www.getresponse.com...

Originally posted by justyc

"The term for which copyright shall subsist shall, except as otherwise expressly provided by this Act, be the life of the author, the remainder of the calendar year in which the author dies, and a period of fifty years following the end of that calendar year".

Once again, thank you, justyc

looks like I'm going to have get to know someone at Staples...

12m8keall2c, at 25 cents a ream, that's a better bargain than I've got.
I'd be going through a lot of printer ink as well. *hint*

Originally posted by justyc

yeahright - that link does not work

Well, that's bizarre. Works for me.

or you could always check out one of those text to speech readers and have an assortment of wierd sounding bots reading you some bedtime stories from your pc.

im going to be checking some of them out soon to see how good they are

Originally posted by yeahright

Originally posted by justyc

yeahright - that link does not work

Well, that's bizarre. Works for me.

maybe you are viewing a cached page on your pc. i have tried variations on that link from google search but none of them work

Okay, now I'm on a mission.:bnghd:

If you enter www.psitek.net... directly into your address bar, you should get a movie with audio. There's a "Skip" hypertext in the lower left corner which you can click on and go directly to -
www.psitek.net...

That's where about 30 books are listed. You can scroll down through the list and read any of them on line.

This works fine for me and it's not out of a cache. I'm using Opera, but I'm not sure why that would matter. It also works for me out of IE, and from home with Firefox.

I'm baffled why it won't work for someone else. Normally, if there's someone something won't work for, it's me.

Anyway, I'm no computer expert, but it's baffling that I seem to be the only one who can get in there. Maybe I am special.

Nahhhh

[Did the Preview thing and the hypertext works for me still. Go figure.]

the link seems to be working now. must have been some internet gremlins around i think.

i also came across this link on the internet archive site...

www.archive.org...

i think you have to install a specific reader first and im not sure how many work though but their list -
book list is quite big

I'm so stupid I didn't even realize "we" had a literature corner here, or I would have plugged the Gutenberg myself. Wonderful site - I downloaded 153 books a couple of days ago... The nice thing for me is that it gives me a chance to look at books I've never heard about, books I would never buy in real life, books I thought were about something else than they in fact were about, etc.

Well, enough plugging for now. Just go there and fill your hard drive with literature.

(Oh - given the choice, I recommend the HTML versions, since they look better and often contain photos, maps, etc.)

*/ edit:

Have now checked out the millionbooks place; not bad, but a tad too much Indian books for my interest. The associated Canadian library did however have a few fun books such as "Harper's encyclopedia of United States history from 458 A.D. to 1905" by (president?) Woodrow Wilson. (The fun there being that I never knew the U.S. was around in 458 A.D. - but then it's been a little while since I went to school.)

[edit on 18-5-2006 by ochre]

*/ edit two:

Just a book find for the conspiracy-minded, from the millionbooks-associated Open Source place:

"The Freemasonic Architecture of History" (by Eric Rainbolt of Austin, Texas):
The Architecture of History (How the World has been Set-Up)
Is history being 'concocted'? Yes it is. Hidden powerful interests associated with 33rd degree freemasonry are attempting to take credit in 'architect'ing history to create a despotic one world totalitarian government. If you thought any president since JFK had good intentions, please look at the long trail of evidence contained in this unique book...

[edit on 18-5-2006 by ochre]