Time to look again at ManyBooks, a fantastic resource for free, public domain works. Here’s what they say about themselves:
Many of the etexts are from the November, 2003 Project Gutenberg DVD, which contains the entire Project Gutenberg archives except for the Human Genome Project and audio eBooks, due to size limitations, and the Project Gutenberg of Australia eBooks, due to copyright. As of July 2004 most current PG texts are available here, usually within the week of release. There are also public domain and creative commons works from many other sources.
Zip archives are stored in the same directory structure as on the DVD, with Author, Title, and related information stored in a MySQL database. Pages are built with PHP and served using the Apache webserver. The server is a 1.66GHz Intel Core Duo Mac mini running Mac OS X 10.4, located at macminicolo.net.
eBooks are generated on demand using a variety of tools, and cached using Amazon’s S3 service – which means that the first time anyone requests an eBook in a particular format it will take a bit longer to deliver, but the next time that eBook is requested it will be sent immediately.
One of the most important features of ManyBooks is the vast number of formats they can provide the user:
ePub, eReader, FictionBook2, HTML, iPod Notes, iSilo, Kindle, Mobipocket (.mobi), Mobipocket (.prc), MS lit, Newton, PalmDOC, PDF, PDF custom, PDF large print, plain text, Plucker, Rocketbook, RTF, Sony Reader.lrf, TCR, zTXT, JAR file, Project Gutenberg.
In addition to can sign up for RSS feeds and be notified when new books are added to categories you select. What prompted this article, as a matter of fact, was a notification I just got of the availability fo Early Days in North Queensland, by Australian pioneer Edward Palmer.
