Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg is named after the famed Johannes Gutenberg (c. 1398-1468), who in 1439 became the first European to use the printing press and thereby opened the possibility for millions of people who could not afford hand written books to purchase and read books for an affordable price and, thereby, be one source that ended the dark ages. Project Gutenberg takes this one giant step further. It offers over 52,000 books free to people having a computer, kindle and the like, as well as another 100,000 books from their partners. These books are free because the copyrights on the books have expired. Amazon also offers similar free books but not in such an organized fashion.
The system is easy to use. One goes no to Gutenberg.org and can use the search engine on the upper right corner to search for a particular book or group of books. One can then read the e-book online, and get all kinds of lists, such as a list of the most downloaded books – Pride and Prejudice won out with 18,642 downloads.
For example: I found two books by inserting Maimonides and dozens for Aristotle. I got hundreds by pressing mystery where the books are sorted by popularity. The top one was Edgar Allan Poe, which had 2408 downloads. I also searched for Judaism and found 104 listed with the top one being Josephus with 539 downloads. One can also search for a particular book, such as Wuthering Heights.
