If you were sort of thinking of snagging the e-books Tor.com has been offering on a weekly basis, but never got around to it, or missed some, it’s not too late. With the launch of Tor’s new web site, they’re making the whole lot available one more time for procrastinators. Check it out this week only on this page at Tor Books. There’s a bunch of cover art available for download, too. Through July 27. Don’t wait!
I just today installed the free Mobipocket Reader software on my Pocket PC, and loaded a whole slew of books in Mobipocket format onto the storage card. Though I’ve only played around with it a bit, I have to say it’s a pretty nice way to view the books, especially considering that the PDA itself (a Cassiopeia) is now something of a vintage device. Tor is offering the books in a variety of formats, but the Mobipocket seems the most compact, and works best as long as you have the software.
Also, thanks to a tip from Rob Sawyer, I purchased on ebay, from a nice lady in England, a DVD containing 10,000 e-books from the Gutenberg project. All kinds of classics, ranging from the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire to H.P. Lovecraft, all in the public domain. It’s only $24 including airmail from England. To find it, do a search on ebay for ON DVD 10.000 MOBIPOCKET ebooks for the KINDLE READER — and you’ll find it.
“A room [or PDA] without books is like a body without a soul.” —Cicero
Pascal Scheffers
You can download all Project Gutenberg books from their website http://www.gutenberg.org/
They also provide torrents for the CD/DVD collections. One of them is called the March 2007 Science Fiction Bookshelf CD.
Jeffrey A. Carver
Thanks for that info, Pascal. I knew that you could download individual titles from the Gutenberg site, but did not know you could actually download the CD/DVD collections as disc images. I’ll have to check out that 2007 SF Bookshelf.
I briefly had a bittorrent client installed on my computer, but I couldn’t tell what it was doing half the time, or how to make it simply download what I wanted and do nothing else. So I uninstalled it. I might try using the smaller download applet they refer to on the download site.
Jeff
Jeffrey A. Carver
Ah–I was just browsing the SF catalogue on Gutenberg, and I see that most of the titles seem to be available as plain text, html, and Plucker (don’t know what that is). The DVD I purchased has everything formatted for MobiPocket reader, which I find handy on my PDA.