Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Go Gutenberg!


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.

Read reviews of my books on my web-site, http://www.bfoswaldauthor.com.

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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