Read all about it
Liz Anderson 5:14pm
Over the coming months, some 65,000 mainly out-of-print 19th-century books can be read — for free. The catch: you have to have a Kindle. The British Library and Amazon have linked up to give away free downloads for Amazon Kindle owners. Literature, philosophy, history and poetry are included — some 25 million pages in all, with Dickens, Austen and Conan Doyle all featuring, as well as lesser-known Victorian classics such as Edward Lytton’s A Strange Story. And if these authors sound too worthy, a selection of penny dreadfuls is there for the downloading, too.
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Peter From Maidstone
February 23rd, 2010 5:29pm Report this commentThese can all be read for free anyhow. Just use books.google.co.uk and www.archive.org.
Jeremy
February 23rd, 2010 5:38pm Report this commentI'm not altogether sure that I would wish to consume literature - if that is what one does - in this form. There is something to be said for the table lamp and the dog-eared copy of the book that you have owned for years. I've been re-reading bits from my copy of The Penguin Book of English Verse (edited by John Hayward). Now, I've owned this particular book since the 1980s, and so it is not just an anthology of poetry, but also a repository of memories - of the places that I have lived in and the people that I knew. And - by virtue of the annotations that I have made next to the text - the book is also a reminder of what I was like at an earlier stage of my own life.
Now...can a "Kindle" give you all of that?
Sir Graphus
February 24th, 2010 11:17am Report this commentNo, it can't, Jeremy. I am also at a loss as to what Kindle owners will put on their bookshelves. There is no more homely sight than a packed bookshelf.
You and I shall have the joy of nosing around 2nd hand bookshops for books we'll actually read, while Kindle users can boast of downloading 95 gigs of stuff in 15.5 minutes and hardly look at any of it.
The Kindle people underestimate the degree to which reading is a tactile experience.
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