Thanks to Mary Farrell and Jennifer Kelly at the Walpole Library for the alert, here is another source for “portable” summer reading. – Lil

Hankering for a classic by Dickens or Austen?  Got a yen for old gardening books?  Want to settle in with an Agatha Christie story?  Project Gutenberg offers over 45,000 e-books free of charge and available anytime and anywhere you have an internet connection.

Project Gutenberg was founded in 1971 by Michael Hart.  Hart had been given $100,000,000 of unrestricted computer time by the operators of the Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the Materials Research Lab at the University of Illinois.  He decided to use his time to create an online repository of books.  He began by posting ASCII text versions of public domain literature, but today Project Gutenberg offers texts in all the common e-reader formats – with Kindle, html and PDF formats.

Anyone can browse Project Gutenberg’s catalog, download books and read them on any mobile device.  If you don’t have a Kindle, for instance, you can download a free Kindle app for your smart phone, iPod or computer.

There’s plenty to read at Project Gutenberg, too.  Although most new books are excluded because of copyright restrictions, the database includes a trove of great literature – all of Dostoevsky, all of Jane Austen, all of Shakespeare and Dickens.  Because U.S. copyright protection extends 50 years after the author’s death, there are some surprising omissions.  You can read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby, for instance, but nothing by Ernest Hemingway, because Fitzgerald died sooner.

Visit http://www.gutenberg.org to get started.  If you have any difficulty uploading books to your digital device, stop by the library and our technology specialist Julie Rios can help.