After writing the post below I got to thinking about the sentence I used: ... volunteer work like this should be recognized every once in a while. It is really incredible how the e-book community is supported by a cadre of volunteers who seem to want to do nothing but make the reading world better. Some of these sites may be looking for investors or hope to turn into a business some day, but as of today they are free to the public. Here are a few that come to mind quickly. I apologize to those I...

We are approaching one of the two times of the year when many people who do not ordinarily attend church nonetheless get up and take themselves in. It seems appropriate, therefore, to look at a few options for e-books to use in church. It should go without saying that a book the size of the Bible is one of the best arguments for having an electronic version that you can keep in your hip pocket. There have been previous attempts to create such a Bible, of course, such as the Franklin NIV-570 electronic NIV Bible pictured at left and its King...

Ars Technica has an interesting review of a forthcoming iPhone e-book app called Classics. Not yet available on the App Store, the gimmick of Classics is that it attempts to replicate the page-turning experience of a "real book" as closely as is possible on the iPhone's screen. For $2.99, it will launch with a library of 12 public-domain titles, such as Alice in Wonderland or 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, with the possibility of adding more with later updates. Without actually trying the app out, I cannot agree or disagree with the specific points Ars makes in its review....

How to find what books to read? That's always a problem. Well, the Manybooks site has an excellent aid to help solve this problem. If you go to the site and, over on the right, click on RSS feeds, and then click on New Titles Sorted by Category, you will be taken to a page with 56 different categories of books. Each one of these links is an RSS feed for that category. Your reader, I use Bloglines, will pop up a feed whenever a new book is added to that category. It works like a charm....

The Kindle includes an experimental web browser so I thought I'd see how it worked with some of the public domain sites I frequent. Feedbooks: as we know Feedbooks works just fine in the Kindle. We have an earlier posting giving a "how to" about using the downloadable Feedbooks catalog.  There is also a mobile site for Feedbooks.  The mobile site has all sorts of ways to sort and browse everything, you can even access your customized recommandations (based on your previous downloads to guess your taste). Manybooks: much to my pleasure Manybooks also works just fine on the Kindle browser. The...

Manybooks.net, as we know, is back up with thousands of public domain and Creative Common titles---in scads of formats for devices ranging from the iPhone to the Kindle and Sony Reader But why did the site go down in the first place? Matt McClintock, a real pro whom I'd trust, believes that hackers accidentally attacked him rather than another target. The lowdown: "It turned out to be a DDoS attack. Don't know who or why, but my guess is that it was a goof on the attacker's part; they just mistyped an IP address and mistakenly flooded...

From Matt McClintock, owner of the wonderful Manybooks.net---home of thousands of free classics and other e-books in multiple formats... "Sorry for the delay---yep, I'm out of town, but not on vacation (unfortunately). The night before I left on this trip there was a monster electrical storm and tornado in the area. "Manybooks.net made it through that alright, with a few reboots, but power to the entire neighborhood was shut off the day after I left, and when the systems were rebooted things looked kind of messed up. "So, manybooks will be...