Free E-Books at ManyBooks.net

Writing the last post about Lending Library by the Internet Archives inspired me to write about ManyBooks.net. For those who own or plan on owning digital e-readers, the manybooks.net project might be of interest. It offers over 28,000 digitized books that are free to download and keep. Books are available in variety of formats to satisfy the various e-readers' requirements.

Users may browse books by titles, authors, genres, or languages. Users may also view the most popular titles or the recommended titles. RSS feeds to all new titles, new titles sorted by category, new titles sorted by language, or site news are available.

And where did all these books come from?

Many of the etexts are from the November, 2003 Project Gutenberg DVD, which contains the entire Project Gutenberg archives except for the Human Genome Project and audio eBooks, due to size limitations, and the Project Gutenberg of Australia eBooks, due to copyright. As of July 2004 most current PG texts are available here, usually within the week of release. There are also public domain and creative commons works from many other sources.

Donations are welcome and for more information about the project, the site, or new titles, you may subscribe to any of the RSS feeds, or to ManyBooks.net twitter account or you may email to Matthew McClintock who maintains the website.

Happy Reading!

Kindle for PC

Via Wired Gadget Lab, Kindle for PC Ships, Hints At Future Color Kindle features Kindle for PC. For those who don't have Kindle or Kindle for iPhone but still desire to read the more then 360,000 of Kindle e-books, you can get a free application for your Windows PC and your e-books on your computer. The free application is for Windows 7, Vista, and XP, and available at the above link.

The application does pretty much what the iPhone version does: your place is synced with other devices by Whispersync, and there is support for your bookmarks and annotations. You can browse and buy from the Kindle Store, but you can’t access blogs, newspapers or magazines.

... This may mean a color Kindle is on its way. ... [Y]ou can now buy and read Kindle books without buying a Kindle.

Any thoughts or comments?

Free Library Check Outs With SONY E-Reader

To follow up on our previous post, via Engadget, Sony's Reader Daily Edition will launch in December 2009 for $400. It has a seven-inch touchscreen. It enables to pull content wirelessly. The 3G network will be free but limited to accessing the Sony eBook store.

The new feature (said to be a major advantage over Kindle) is

[t]he library finder service, which enables you to check out ebooks and other digital content from your local public library on any of the Readers -- for free.

The New York Public Library is the flashy public launch partner, but there are "thousands more" looped in through a partnership with Overdrive.com -- check out the huge selection of top-tier content you can get through the Chicago Public Library, for example.

The library buys a fixed number of "copies" of each title and "checks out" the licenses, so you're on a time limit -- licenses will revert after 14-29 days depending on your local branch's rules.

Any thoughts?