TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Free Access to Online Books

Free Access to Online Books

Dave Carpenter (ap@telecom-digest.org)
Fri, 2 Jun 2006 19:43:49 -0500

By DAVE CARPENTER, AP Business Writer

Electronic book devotees may want to set aside some extra screen time
this summer, as two nonprofits are preparing to provide free access to
300,000 texts online.

Project Gutenberg and World eBook Library plan to make "a third of a
million" e-books available free for a month at the first World eBook
Fair. Downloads will be available at the fair's Web site from July 4,
the 35th anniversary of Project Gutenberg's founding, through Aug. 4.

The majority of the books will be contributed by the World eBook
Library. It otherwise charges $8.95 a year for access to its database
of more than 250,000 e-books, documents and articles.

But the book fair won't be the last chance for e-bookworms to devour
works ranging from "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" to "Old Indian
Legends," not to mention dictionaries and thesauruses, without paying
for them.

Project Gutenberg founder Michael Hart, who first announced the
ambitious plan a month ago, said Friday the partners are on track to
make 1 million books available for the annual fair's one-month run in
2009, with more appearing in subsequent years. About 100,000, he said,
will be permanently available at the handful of Project Gutenberg
sites on the Internet.

"We want to give the most books to the most people," the 59-year-old
Hart said by phone from Urbana, where he established the project in
1971 after graduating from the University of Illinois. "It has been
our goal since the dawn of the Internet to break down the bars of
ignorance and illiteracy."

The Gutenberg books, typed and scanned into computers by thousands of
volunteers, mostly are those that are no longer protected by
copyright. They include fiction, nonfiction and reference books and
will be available for worldwide readers in about 100 languages.

While the commercial e-book market remains tiny, Hart said electronic
books have "caught on without getting a lot of publicity" and are
being widely read on handheld computers, cell phones and even special
programs for use on iPods.

"These people that grew up on GameBoys -- to them a GameBoy screen is
the standard size," he said. "To us old folks, it's too small. But
they don't care."

Based on fast-increasing demand, he predicted there will be 10 million
e-books available by 2020.

"I've gotten notes from people who said they would have never, ever
read Shakespeare if I hadn't put it on the Internet," Hart said.

On the Net:

http://gutenberg.org
http://worldebookfair.com

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press.

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