Free Digital Books from The World eBook Fair

Everton Publishers’ Genealogy Blog reports that Project Gutenberg and World eBook Library are sponsoring the World eBook Fair.

Project Gutenberg, with the cooperation of many other eBook publishers, is currently sponsoring a month-long eBook Fair. They have made available about 1/3 million books – free of charge – until August 4, 2006.

The World eBook Fair has over 330,000 digital ebooks available for free downloading on “nearly every classic author on the varieties of subjects previously only available through the largest library collections in the world.” Once downloaded, you can use these books, free of charge, indefinitely. Normally, the World eBook Library charges USD $8.95 per year for online access with unlimited personal downloading.

I read a lot of books, and a few years ago I fell in love with my Palm handheld computer, turning it into the perfect reading tool. I use inDev Software’s Tiny Book Reader (TiBR Pro). It allows for reading text, zTXT, or PalmDocs (pdb) files from your handheld’s memory or your storage card. You can adjust the font size and style for easier reading from small to extra-large. You can also set the smooth scrolling rate easily to move the text down the page at your own pace. No more scrapping sounds of turning pages in the middle of the night. No night light on in the night as the Palm has its own backlight, and I rarely lose my place as it stops scrolling as soon as I touch the screen. There is also a free conversion program which will create PalmDoc or zTXT books from some other book versions called TiBR Converter.

I thought I’d check out the free books available through the World eBook Fair. After an attempt with their general search left me in frustration, I found their eBook Collections. You can still search, but the search includes all forums, articles, and other information not directly related to specific books. If you know the specific subject, title or author, then that works, especially if you use the words or phrase wrapped with quote marks. Unfortunately, the site doesn’t believe in web standards for accessibility. Every search or click on a search result pops up a new page. Hitting the eBook Collections list was more successful.

To get to the Collections, scroll part way down the page past the letter to the beginning of the alphabetized collection list.

I found some interesting collections. The Baen Free Library Collection featured hard core science fiction books recommended by Jim Baen, a long time expert in science fiction publishing. Free books included authors like Larry Niven, Andre Norton, Mercedes Lackey, David Weber, and David Drake, including a few published within the past 10 years.

Other interesting free book collections ranged from technical to political and governmental to children’s books. I found some books to download from the Classic Literature Collection, the Cordella Collegiate Bookshelf of Classic Literature, University of Adelaide Library of Web Books of historical novels and text, Etana – CWRU University Library Digital Collection of Earliest Written Texts of the Ancient Near East including religious and historical texts, and Renascence Editions of works printed in English between 1477 and 1799. Take a look to see if there is anything that catches your eye.

The books mostly come in PDF format. In order to use them with the Tibr program, I open them in a PDF reader, select all the text for the entire document, and paste it into a text editor. I save it as a text file and run it through the TiBR converter. Then I upload the converted file to my handheld computer and I read with joy.

A few of the more technical or historical books have not been OCRed, the technique of digitally converting the text image into actual text. They have been scanned and you read the scanned images from within PDF files. Many of these 300-800 page books are saved in sections such as pages 20-40, 41-60, and so on. In order to download the entire book, you have to download each file individually. I tried using a website copier program and it was stopped at the door. When possible, I recommend using the File Save As or Save Target As options from the Right Click menu in your web browser instead of opening each PDF document. These scanned-image-only documents are frustrating to work with, but they do capture the images, fonts, and layout of the original books.

There are some really good books, and many of the older books listed are also available via the Gutenberg Press Project. I’ve included a list of other online resources for downloading free books below.

Reportedly, this ends August 4, 2006, so go get your free books and have a good read or three.

Related Articles

• Free eBooks from Australia
• Books Online: Project Gutenberg
• The Online Books Page
• Baen Free Library – Free Books Online

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, member of the 9Rules Network