Free as the Written Word
Just as with our recent set on cheap and free music, Truly Obscure supports the idea that the best things in life are (mostly) free. Once you’ve paid for the computer, internet access, and the education that allows you to enjoy it all- well, you might as well get your money’s worth.
Of course, we like to keep it legal- we’re not promoting piracy here, people! But we have to admit that there are few things more annoying than paying for yet another copy of Dante’s Inferno when it’s checked out of the library and you’ve yet again sold it for pennies on the dollar to the bookstore- and once again a professor asks you about the rings of hell. Hasn’t someone put that damned book where it belongs… online?
Yeah, actually, they have. For free. In Italian or English or German or Finnish, or Friulano. It’s even illustrated, thanks to the miracles of public domain, scanners, and people with too much time on their hands. Project Gutenberg is an ambitious attempt to scan, catalogue, and make available thousands of works whose copyrights have expired or whose authors have voluntarily forgone some rights.
The current library consists of about 16,000 books, all of them downloadable, in a variety of formats. They work on older computers, Macs, even PDAs. And they have works from a variety of languages, though most are in English.
A recent look at their top 100 books was interesting. Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks are at the head of the list, followed by The Art of War, The Kamasutra, War of the Worlds, and everyone’s bloomin’ favorite Ulysses at lucky number 13. But maybe those books are too stuffy, or too old for you- author Cory Doctorow has posted his recent science fiction novels under a Creative Commons license and they can be found at Project Gutenberg as well.
Perhaps neatest of all, they even offer some audiobooks. 368 of them were computer generated, and while listening to Aesop’s Fables sounds great, the very synthetic voice just doesn’t lend itself to oral storytelling. On the other hand, the 31 human-read books are kind of neat, especially if you’ve never found the time to read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Though there are problems and static with some of the files, audiobooks seem like an excellent resource for those of you who have some room left on your iPod.
