Tuesday, September 27, 2011

The Magic Catalog of Project Gutenberg E-Books

Have you heard of The Magic Catalog of Project Gutenberg E-Books? You need never complain of lack of reading material again.
Just download that book-index-link file, and put it on your Kindle (or other ereader, there's a Kindle/mobi version and a ePub version). When you open it, click on the link of any book which interests you, and it downloads to your ereader automatically and near-instantly from Project Gutenberg! (As you may know, that is a big collection of free books which are out of copyright, collected and converted to ebooks by volunteers.)
You can find the file directly on the Kindle just by googling it in the Kindle's "experimental browser".

The Magic Catalogue seems to have no organization whatsoever, beyond perhaps very popular books being first (Mark Twain and E Rice Burroughs are early). You're supposed to use search, or to just grab whatever hits your fancy.

By the way, on my Kindle 3, I have an odd bug: on the top line on a Catalogue page, I can't click it, instead I get a line cursor to make highlights with or select a word. Does anybody know how to make it into a hand cursor for clicking links?
(If necessary it can be solved by opening the Catalogue in the Kindle app on a PC or Mac, downloading and transferring to the Kindle by USB.) (Though oddly, downloading does not seem to work on my iPad's Kindle app.)

For the iPad, the ePub version seems to work nicely in the iBooks app.

... Holy mama, there's a lifetime's worth of classics reading there! All for the grabbing. What a brave new world.

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