Ever since I started reading books on a tablet, I haven’t wanted to read anything so old-fashioned as a paperback or hardback any more. Not that I don’t like old books, I just find the ability to read without having to hold the thing I’m reading such a pleasure. Also the adjustable brightness means I can read in a room with low light – something I always found tiring on my eyes with the hard-copy technology. I like dentist-intensity light, preferably daylight, to read by. I use Google Play Books as my main bookstore but have also started reading using the Kindle app on Android recently as prices vary quite considerably between the sellers for some books.
However, if you’re of a mind to read some old books, there are about 49,000 of them to download for free at Project Gutenberg at www.gutenberg.org. Below are the top 30 downloads for the last 30 days as of publishing this post. You can read the books online or download them as .epub (for most eBook readers), Kindle or plain text to do with as you like. Lots of them come without any covers included but, if you’re like me and need a picture to go with the books in your library, you can easily rectify this with the Calibre eBook library manager and then upload to your reader of choice.
By the way, the book covers featured above don’t come from Gutenberg – they’re just a selection I picked up on Google images to add covers to books that had none already.
Happy reading!
Top 30 downloads from Project Gutenberg July 2015
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (36405)
- Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (25082)
- The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana by Vatsyayana (16202)
- Falling in Love; With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science by Grant Allen (15725)
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (15319)
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (14823)
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle (14466)
- The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli (13463)
- A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (13211)
- Moby Dick; Or, The Whale by Herman Melville (12854)
- The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (12175)
- The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (12028)
- Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (11887)
- Ulysses by James Joyce (11827)
- The Romance of Lust: A Classic Victorian erotic novel by Anonymous (11468)
- Grimms’ Fairy Tales by Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm (10750)
- Emma by Jane Austen (10242)
- Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (10045)
- Beowulf (9707)
- The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People by Oscar Wilde (9238)
- The Count of Monte Cristo, Illustrated by Alexandre Dumas (9164)
- Les Misérables by Victor Hugo (8798)
- Dracula by Bram Stoker (8628)
- The Iliad by Homer (8561)
- The Divine Comedy by Dante, Illustrated by Dante Alighieri (8179)
- Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein (8022)
- Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen (7333)
- Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie (7263)
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (7152)
- Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (7058)