Website of the Week

Project Gutenberg - http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page
Review by Nate Martin, SWC Library Faculty

I've recently started working at the reference desk at National City Public Library and unfortunately I've found my success rate of finding books on the shelf for patrons on the low side. Even when everything looks in order in the online catalog, which is almost impossible for a non librarian library user to navigate, I'm still probably only batting .333 when it comes to actually locating the material.

So I've been trying to find some alternatives and naturally one place to explore is eBooks. I started browsing the eBook sites listed on the SWC library page and Project Gutenberg was one site that I realized I could use both at the Public library and certainly at the desk at SWC.

Some of the eBooks I've shown include plays by Shakespeare, the Bible, Huck Finn, The Republic by Plato, and Great Expectations by Dickens. It's great for English Lit majors. The items are almost all 80 or more years old so don't expect to find the latest best seller or a book about future technology in the library! It's not an overly attractive site but it gets the job done in certain circumstances. Here are some details/highlights:

• Over 36,000 free eBooks available for download to PC, Kindle, Android, etc.

• Almost all the books are out of copyright in the U.S. so the books are not only free of charge but you are also free to do as you like with them. Copy them, pass them on to a friend, distribute to a class, etc.

• New books are added daily in English as well as 60 other languages. Some languages only have 1 or 2 books but some of the others such as French, German, Chinese, and Spanish have over 100 up to 2000.

• Some books are available as audio books as well.

From the site "Project Gutenberg is the first and largest single collection of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971."

Enjoy!

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