All Stories

If you haven’t tried ebooks before and wonder what they are about, or if you are a fan of classic literature from Mark Twain to Dante Alighieri, exploring Project Gutenberg is a great way to get started.

Project Gutenberg offers more than 42,000 ebooks in approximately 66 languages, as well as audiobooks. The collection consists of out-of-copyright works in various formats from HTML (web) text, epub, or Kindle. Many are available with illustrations.

Visit Project Gutenberg on the web at www.gutenberg.org. Once there, you may search the catalog or click the link to browse. There is a link to the top 100 books in case you don’t really know where to start. Here are a few examples of ways you can get and use various books.

View the HTML version
The simplest way is to the view the HTML version of a book and just read the plain text on the screen. For example, you can search in the box at the upper left of the main page for “Jules Verne.” When the list of books appears, find the title that you want. Note that there are versions in the original French or in English and Italian. If you click “Around the World in Eighty Days,” you will see choices of “Read this book online (HTML)”, EPUB (no images), Kindle (no images) and Plain text. To read it on the screen, click the HTML link.  The text is fairly well formatted although very small on the screen. You can press Ctrl-+ on your keyboard or use your browser menus to increase the text size for easier reading.

Kindle
If you want the Kindle version of Alice in Wonderland with images, search for “Alice in Wonderland.” You will find the actual title listed of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and a few of the listings show book covers. When you click the first one with the reddish-brown cover, you will see six different options, including a Kindle version with images. When you click on that item, it will download the file, and when you click the file, it should open the Kindle app from your computer. (You must have downloaded and installed the Kindle app earlier.) The Kindle app will let you read through the book and “turn pages” by clicking the arrows on the right or left. You can click on the Google Drive icon at the right to put the file into your Carthage Google Drive account. For example, click the Google Drive icon to the right of the illustrated Kindle version of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” and then you can access it on another device such as an iPad. On your iPad, open Google Drive and search for “Alice.” When you click the .mobi file, it will first tell you it can’t open and give you the option to open it in another app. It will search for apps that might work and show you a brief list of choices. When you click the Kindle app icon, the book opens very neatly in the Kindle app and allows you to read the text, see the illustrations and turn pages with your finger.

Watch The Bridge in coming weeks for information on how to access Project Gutenberg audiobooks.