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By David Rothman

image Kindle owners can download free public domain books  directly at FreeKindleBooks.org, as I noted here recently.

Why spend $1 and maybe even several dollars at Amazon for plain old public domain books that often are just the same titles with price tags added?

Now Project Gutenberg volunteer Jim Adcock is proposing that the main Gutenberg site make “free” easier. He envisions special gateway pages on the site—for Kindles and other mobile devices with limited browsing capability. Kindle owners and the rest could then speed on to uncluttered download pages. The present “inside” pages can be too long and complex for puny browsers.

Yes, I love the the Adcock idea. He and others have experimented with catalogs of links to individual books that Kindle owners can click on. But as a Kindle owner, I’ve actually found direct downloads to be much less of a hassle, especially since there are no updating issues. Sites such as Feedbooks and Manybooks.net are far friendlier to direct mobile downloads than the main Gutenberg site is. Alas, however, they lack the number of titles that Gutenberg has.

More attention to usability, please, Michael

As often seems the case on usability issues, Project Gutenberg Founder Michael Hart is a little behind the curve, but ideally he’ll catch up.

“I’m not pushing as hard for those, yet,” he says of accommodations for dedicated readers, “simply because there aren’t enough of them.  With Kindle recently yak[ing] up a storm of numbers up to nearly 2 million, when not saying one word about sales up until then, I suspect a little manipulation of sales figures ensued. However, even if Kindle and Sony each had two million it would be only one per thousand cellphones.”

True, but we’re probably not taking about that much effort compared to the benefits—in publicity alone. The Kindle and the other dedicated machines have the attention of the mass media now. Gutenberg should strike before it’s too late What’s more, special mobile-device pages can also be used for cellphones. Like Michael, I agree that cellphones and other multiuse devices are where the real e-book action could be: I just don’t want to see Kindles and the rest neglected by the public domain community.

Bottom line: I hope that Project Gutenberg acts on the Adock proposal quickly. If Gutenberg wants people to accustom to themselves to free public domain books—rather than the ones for sale at Amazon and elsewhere—this is a good way to do it.

In a related vein: Ideally PG will stop being so fixated the idea of other sites linking to the main entrance of the site when people just want to get to specific books. After all these decades, it’s high time for PG to start using stable links inside. One reason blogs have taken off is the focus on direct linking. Isn’t that what the Web should be all about?

 
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