
Put a thousand books from the British Library on your iPad for free - shawndumas
http://www.tuaw.com/2011/06/12/put-a-thousand-books-from-the-british-library-on-your-ipad-for-f/
======
tomjen3
Awesome, but for those of use without an iPad, there is still
www.gutenberg.org. They don't have that many beautiful illustrations, but they
have far, far more literature and they are all in text files.

    
    
      http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1342 Pride and Prejudiced
      http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28054 The Brothers Karamazov
      http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1524 Hamlet
      http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28233 Sir Isaac Newtons Principa mathematica
      http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14986 Experimental Research in electricity by Michael Faraday
      http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/215 Jack Londons call of the wild
      http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/103 Around the world in 80 days
      http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3748 A Journey to the center of the earth
      

And countless others, including Benjamin Franklins autobiography
[<http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/148>].

The only sad things is that there are more books there than I will ever have
time to read.

~~~
cageface
It would be great if Gutenberg had a nice, polished app browser interface like
this. I've loaded a bunch of stuff from Gutenberg on my iPad but the process
is pretty clunky.

~~~
schrototo
Isn't the Project Gutenberg catalog available on the iBooks store? (Here in
Austria it's the only thing on there. Thank's very much publishing cartels...)

------
mechanical_fish
I applaud efforts like this one, because if the fashion of looking at books in
their original layout catches on maybe I'll finally be able to buy an ebook
with decent typography.

The average ebook is appallingly ugly, and poorly proofread to boot.
Typographers and publishers have known how to fix this problem for several
centuries -- it's striking how nice the typesetting looks in a printed book
from 1830 -- but apparently ebook technology is too primitive to assist them,
or maybe it's just that nobody has been able to afford to take the time, since
there has never been any money in ebooks before. This can be fixed and it
should be fixed.

~~~
hugh3
Wait, isn't the average ebook just text, rendered by your reader?

~~~
schrototo
_Exactly_. Typography is a difficult and subtle craft which is not that easily
emulated by algorithms. Knuth was able to do a pretty good job. The
programmers responsible for most of today's eBook text-rendering & layout
engines apparently aren't.

------
jleyank
I think people are missing the point here. This is for bibliophiles not
readers. Those interested in "just the text files" probably want the Book of
Kells w/o the calligraphy...

------
oscardelben
Now, that's a lot of books. I'm sure it'll be great to procrastinate on those.

Just today Sebastian Marshall sent his weekly newsletter[1] about targeted
procrastination. Here's how it could be adapted for reading some of these
books:

\- Write down two or three topics that you're interested in.

\- Do a search for books that match those subjects, and write them down.

\- When you feel like taking a break, pick one book from the list, and start
reading.

I like this approach because I easily get tired from reading a book for a long
time, but it's easy to do it in 10-15 minute chunks.

I'm not the type that reads lots of books anymore, but I prefer that over
lurking on Facebook or Twitter.

[1] <http://getsomevictory.com/>

------
hugh3
Is there a list of the books somewhere?

------
za
[http://pressandpolicy.bl.uk/Press-Releases/BiblioLabs-and-
th...](http://pressandpolicy.bl.uk/Press-Releases/BiblioLabs-and-the-British-
Library-Announce-British-Library-19th-Century-Historical-Collection-App-for-
iPad-4f6.aspx)

------
chrisjsmith
I'd rather have a thousand text files which are platform portable.

~~~
wzdd
> I'd rather have a thousand text files

Then you are certainly not the target audience.

"The books have been scanned in high resolution and color so you can see the
engraved illustrations, the beauty of the embossed covers, along with maps and
even the texture of the paper the books were printed on."

A better quip would involve PNG files.

~~~
vixen99
Put another way, why has the UK taxpayer-funded BL made its initial offering
only for Apple customers?

~~~
smcl
Probably the same reason the UK license-fee-funded BBC initially supported
iPlayer on Windows only - it's the most popular tablet platform (or so I
believe). The Kindle\Android flavours are apparently on their way, let's give
them a chance eh.

~~~
chrisjsmith
However there are totally open formats which you could use on all platforms...

I'm not sure the popularity of the iPad is actually as high as everyone
thinks. I think that's the Apple marketing reality distortion field. I see WAY
more Kindles and Android phones than I see iPhones and iPads on trains in and
out of London where I live.

~~~
Retric
The iPad is by far the most popular tablet and still makes up over 50% of the
market. The iPhone is a vary popular phone, but there are far more options for
phones out there than tablets.

~~~
chrisjsmith
Incorrect. It makes up 50% of the SALES of an unclearly defined MARKET and
term TABLET.

~~~
Terretta
Forget 50%. iPad has 53 _TIMES_ the online usage of the nearest competitor:

<http://mashable.com/2011/06/02/ipad-web-usage/>

Your certainty that reality is otherwise seems to be in want of a citation.

~~~
chrisjsmith
Mashable as a citation... whatever next.

Define "competitor" and "popularity". It's all damn lies and statistics.

My old Windows tablet could be a competitor. Dell do a tablet Windows machine.
Motorola do a hybrid device. Is an ebook reader a tablet? Is an iPod touch a
tablet?

Perhaps people with iPads hammer web sites? Perhaps people without iPads
don't? Perhaps some mobile browsers identify themselves as desktop ones?

There is no defined taxonomy to classify things in either.

It's all pirates vs global warming.

