I first learned about Project Gutenberg a couple of years ago. According to Wikipedia (which contains a clearer description of Project Gutenberg than the organization’s own site),

Project Gutenberg is a volunteer effort to digitize, archive and distribute cultural works. Founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart, it is the oldest digital library. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain books. The project tries to make these as free as possible, in long-lasting, open formats that can be used on almost any computer.

Project Gutenberg currently has over 27,000 items in its collection, the vast majority of which are in English.

With my busy schedule, I rarely have time to read actual books these days, so Project Gutenberg hasn’t really been at the top of my mind. However, an e-mail I received earlier this week prompted me to re-visit the site, and to share what I learned with you.

It turns out that Project Gutenberg, and its partners and affiliates, offer free e-books that you can read on your cell phone or PDA, as well as on your computer. They even offer audiobooks!

While some of the available works are obscure, many are classics. At the Project Gutenberg site, you can browse by author, title or format. You can also view lists of the top 100 e-books and authors over various periods.

Project Gutenberg affiliate ManyBooks.net offers many of PG’s works in a dizzying array of formats, from JAR (a common Java file format readable on
nearly all mobile handsets) to Plucker (an offline web and free eBook reader for Palm OS® based handheld devices, Windows Mobile (PocketPC) devices and other handheld PDAs) to large print PDF and, yes, even Kindle (assuming, of course, that you were able to get your hands on one before they sold out, or that you’re patient enough to wait 3 months to get one). Check out the Special Collections page for helpful recommendations.

The MobileBooks.org interface isn’t as nice as the one over at ManyBooks.net. Still, with over 20,000 e-books available, the site is nothing to sneeze at.

The Mobile Library offers a very limited selection of well-known titles in JAR formats.

You can download free audiobooks from the Project Gutenberg site, as well as from Librivox.org. LiteralSystems.org offers a very limited selection of audiobooks, but most are popular titles, and the production quality appears to be very high, with dramatic readings and even appropriate background music.

Finally, a new format called PG Mobile will soon be available. According to a Project Gutenberg news release,

PG Mobile is a software that transfers the plain text format provided by Project Gutenberg onto small handset screens—together with all the features known from physical books like turning pages, page numbers and bookmarks. Just download the PG Mobile version of any eBook and read it on your phone: All Project Gutenberg mobile eBooks will soon be available for download as an additional file format in the download section of each Gutenberg title on Gutenberg.org.

With all of these free e-book options, you’ll never be at a loss for reading (or listening) material.

Which free e-books have you downloaded from any of these sites? Which ones do you plan to download in the future?

**Update 12/24/08: A helpful Kindle-owning friend pointed out that, although the Kindle can’t read .txt files, you can convert a .txt file to PDF and then e-mail it to your Kindle. Presto: enough e-books to keep your Kindle busy for a loooong time!**