I am
a novelist with eight ebooks 'shelved' at all of the leading ebook
distributers. And like all authors I want readers to buy my books, not so much
to make money for there is precious little to be made in the ebook market for
most of us, but because like all artists (and writing is an artistic endeavor),
I want people to enjoy and appreciate my work. Therefore I also support the
public library system, used bookstores, and the gifting and loaning of books,
even though I receive not a penny in royalties from any of these outlets. (To
do otherwise would be hypocrisy on my part because ninety percent of the books
I read are from these sources. I offer a weak apology to my fellow authors for
not buying more of their work.)
During
both high school and college I was required to take English literature classes
wherein I was assigned certain writings deemed to be classics. I have no recollection of either enjoying or appreciating
these books about which I had to write reports—they just were means to an end.
However there apparently was a subliminal appreciation because when four years
ago I bought my first e-reader, a Nook, I was offered a bundle of eighty-one classics for under four dollars. Such a
deal my frugality could not pass up. I rationalized that within that mix would
be at least a half dozen novels I might enjoy reading—again; they were titles I
had been forced to read much earlier in life. Subsequently I read all but five
of the eighty-one titles and rediscovered the classics, this time with much enjoyment.
The
eighty-one classics package included works by Jane Austin, the Bronte sisters,
Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, and other seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth
and a handful of early twentieth century authors. The majority of these stories
had been written in pen on paper, which I found to be short of miraculous. How
did they produce these monumental works of literary art without keyboard, mouse
and monitor, the ability to delete, to cut and paste, on-screen dictionaries,
spelling and grammar checkers, automatic formatting, Google and the other
timesaving shortcuts to getting words out of mind into view on which I so
heavily depend for my productions? Also these works whetted my appetite for
more of the same. In searching for more, I discovered Project Gutenberg.
Project
Gutenberg, the first producer of free
e-books, now 'shelves' over 42,000
volumes for on-line downloading in the major formats such as HTML, EPUB, MOBI
(for Kindle), Plucker, Plain Text UTF-8 and more. Project Gutenberg offers high
quality ebooks that were previously published by bona fide publishers that have been digitized and diligently
proofread (mostly) by thousands of volunteers. Many of these works can only be
found on the shelves of rare bookstores at substantial prices or in private
collections because they are long out of print. The majority of the novels I've
downloaded from Project Gutenberg are well crafted with carefully drawn
characters and sterling plots, and provide windows into the past and reveal
venues that are now much changed, all of which should be of special interest to
those readers like me who find history fascinating. Also contemporary authors I've
read who mentioned them in their work have pointed me to many of the titles I’ve
downloaded. (Example: Paula McLain in The
Paris Wife, a very good read by the way, suggested Green Mansions by William Henry Hudson that I downloaded to my
Kindle Fire from Project Gutenberg and thoroughly enjoyed.) The web site, http://www.gutenberg.org, is easily
navigated requiring only a book title or an author's name to get started. The next time you are surfing the 'Net' take a
look at this treasure trove of great literature; you might be pleasantly
surprised.
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send it to me at mailto:bfoswald78@gmail.com. Thank you.
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