25,000+ free Project Gutenberg books: An easy way to read ‘em on your iPhone—everything from ancient classics to Sherlock Holmes and modern SF
You can buy single classics for the iPhone or iPod Touch and enjoy them with a simple, built-in reader.
But what if you could easily pick from Project Gutenberg’s 25,000 classics and more recent works—Creative Commons books, for example—and not pay a penny? This means virtually the whole collection, from The Odyssey to Jane Austen’s masterpieces, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Homes mysteries, Jules Verne’s science fiction or Cory Doctorow’s modern SF titles.
iPhone and Touch owners can do the above—through the Stanza program for the iPhone. Another good program exists with a Gutenberg connection, BookZ; but its searching mechanism isn’t quite as slick.
Here’s how you can use Stanza to snag thousands of free books:
1. Tap the blue-and-white App Store icon on your iPhone or Touch desktop.
2. Search for and install the Stanza program. The icon for Stanza will show as another bluish icion—with a book outlined in white.
3. Once you’ve got Stanza going, tap on Online Catalog.
4. As the seventh or so icon from the top—at least right now—you’ll see: Project Gutenberg: 25,000+ free books.
5. Tap on the Gutenberg listing. You’ll see lists of the most popular books and authors, recent additions, genres and languages.
6. Next tap on the list most applicable to you—for example, the list of the most popular titles. And so on.
7. Best of all, you can tap on the magnifying glass at the top and key in the name of an author or title. then do a search.
8. When a book cover appears, click on the Download button.
9. Then tap on the Read Now one.
10. Advance a page by tapping the right side of the screen.
11. Go back by tapping the left.
12. Leave the program by tapping the exit button at the bottom of your iPhone or Touch.
13, You can return to your place in the book merely by tapping the Stanza icon.
I based the above instructions on Stanza as it’s installed on my Touch. If I’ve forgotten about customizations or otherwise sinned, please speak up in the comments column and I’ll do a fix.
The ePub angle: The ePub standard is the format that Stanza uses to read Gutenberg books, even though they start out in other formats.
Detail: People have argued over what counts as a separate "book" in toting up the total number available through Gutenberg. The 25,000+ figure is from the organization itself. The actual number may or may not be that high. But one thing is certain: you’re talking about a lot of free books.
Speaking of the iPhone and Touch: The Solomon Scandals, my Washington novel just published through Twilight Times Books, is now available via the Stanza/Fictionwise store, reachable through the Online Catalog described above. Meanwhile the Books on Board store has added the Mobipocket format for Scandals (probably without DRM, though I’m not sure).
February 19th, 2009 at 1:53 am
I’m surprised you find this a big deal - the Manybooks site on the download site list for eReader has almost every Gutenberg title available, and the BookZ reader also links directly to Gutenberg.
But this just highlights one key drawback with Gutenberg for all the ereaders for me - they can’t format poetry properly! When I download classic poetry in eReader or ePub format, most of the time the result is an unreadable mess - no proper line spacing, no separation between verses, sometimes no separation between poems.
So far no ebook program has managed to fix this - I don’t know if the fault is Gutenberg’s, but I guess it is, since it’s the same fault across multiple readers, and both eReader and Stanza can display poems perfectly well. I’m having to remake by hand almost every file I download from Gutenberg, and it’s a pain, so I wish they would - line breaks are pretty elementary!