Gutenberg Project

You just need a PDF reader or software that can read PDFs.

I just downloaded Anna Karenina, Twelve Caesars, The Histories of Herodotus and the poems of Wilfred Owen in epub format, which the Sony Touch also reads. I love this site.

Is this the site you mean? http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

If it is, just go to the "browse catalogue" in the upper left corner. Getting to the books is then easy, and you download them by right clicking and using "save target", or whatever phrase your broswer has. Most are downloadable as text files, or HTML, and you need no special software to read them.

A fun reader for the text files is this one: http://www.spacejock.com/yBook.html

You can also use this one, which links directly to Project Gutenberg. You can download books directly through it, and read them on it. http://www.rudenko.com/ebook.html

I've used that site to download several ebooks and I downloaded the free ereader from Adobe that's called Adobe Digital Editions - http://www.adobe.com/products/digitaleditions/

Go to the page of the book you want and look for a file format that says EPUB - that's the one you need to read it on an ereader. For instance: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2147 - at the bottom you'll see the EPUB format and you just click the download link. You don't need any special software to download it to your computer, you just need an ereader to read it. HTH.

If you're still having trouble then you can always post a link and we can try to help you figure it out.

EDIT:

All I get is the Bibliography table.

Click to expand...

I think I know what you're talking about. Is this the kind of page you're talking about http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/p#a481 ? If so, then just click on the title of the work you want and then it'll take you to the download page for that title.

I usually search for an author's surname, then download the zip file containing a text file, which I can read in Notepad or browse in Firefox.

-Derek

Linda Adams said:

You just need a PDF reader or software that can read PDFs.

Click to expand...

Not even that, necessarily. Many of the texts are in simple ASCII, readable via any text-editor or word-processor.

HOWEVER, as admirable as the Gutenberg Project is, the quality of the texts varies wildly. Many of them appear to have simply been scanned using some OCR program, and not otherwise edited. These are chockfull of errors, to the point at times of being unreadable.

There are a lot of other free public domain book sites out there. None is as voluminous as Gutenberg, of course, but for many of the classics you'll find higher quality texts at some of these others.

caw

You don't need any software; most of the books can be downloaded in plain text format. If they are compressed (zip file), you need to decompress, but Windows will do that for you these days.

I go there off and on in search of things I read long ago, and sometimes for research.

Follow the links around, and see how the site is organized. You can search for titles and authors.

There is also an Australian Gutenberg, with texts which might not be on the main site.

Also, remember that with translated books they only have translations where the copyright has expired.

I had the book version of Huysman's Against Nature, which is an excellent book. I prefer to read on my Sony Reader e-book reader, so half way through I downloaded the same book in the earlier translation, called "Against the Grain". The earlier translation is, pardon my French, god awful and dumbed down, which has gone out of the way to avoid the central, and more disturbing, theme.

Just something I found.