Free Ebooks for your PDA!
Just because a book is old--and has fallen into the public domain--does
not mean it has no value. I have found several sites which offer free ebooks,
and I will list some of them here.
With no disrespect to Project Gutenberg,
from which many of these texts are derived, I will be concentrating upon sites
that offer them in ready-to-read PDA-syncable formatting.
Black Mask
Perhaps the greatest free ebook library on the web today, Black Mask draws from many sources, including
Gutenberg but also others, and lists, categorizes, and converts its books
to multiple formats: HTML, PDF, iSilo, Mobibook, and more. All you have to
do is click a link, and the book is downloaded right to you.
Here are only some of the categories, with examples of the books
that can be found therein:
Action Adventure
- Alexander Dumas Pere -- All for one and one for all! The Three
Musketeers and its myriad of sequels
- Anthony Hope -- The Prisoner of Zenda and more
- Baroness Orczy -- The Scarlet Pimpernel, Zorro's spiritual
ancestor
- Edgar Rice Burroughs -- Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, Carson of Venus,
many a Western...did the man ever slow down?
- H. Rider Haggard -- King Solomon's Mines and more
- Jack London -- The Call of the Wild and more
- Joseph Conrad -- The Heart of Darkness
- Robert Louis Stevenson -- Treasure Island and many more
- Rudyard Kipling -- The quintessential soldier poet: The Jungle
Book, Kim, et cetera
- Many more!
Gothic Fiction
- Bram Stoker -- Dracula and more!
- Edgar Allen Poe -- Quoth the raven...
- Edward Bulwer Lytton -- The father of turgid prose, originator of
the phrase "It was a dark and stormy night..."
- Lord Dunsany -- Author of The Book of Wonder; admired by H.P.
Lovecraft
- Percy Bysse & Mary Shelley -- Poets, novelists, Frankenstein
- H. P. Lovecraft -- Herbert West: Reanimator and Other Stories,
and other works
- Many more!
Mystery
- Agatha Christie -- Three of her early novels that are in the public
domain
- Arthur Conan Doyle -- The earlier cases of Sherlock Holmes, The
Lost World, and more
- E. Philips Oppenheim -- Writer of mystery and espionage
- E.W. Hornung -- Raffles, the gentleman thief--written by Conan Doyle's
brother-in-law!
- G.K. Chesterton -- Mystery novelist, great Christian writer, friend
of Tolkien
- Maurice Leblanc -- Arsene Lupin, gentleman cabriolet (burglar)--illustrious
ancestor of Lupin III!
- Sax Rohmer -- What cast of villains would be complete without the
insidious Dr. Fu Manchu?
- Wilkie Collins -- Author of the first true "detective" novel, The
Moonstone.
- Many more!
Pulp Fiction
- The Mark of Zorro by Johnston McCulley -- the very first Zorro
novel, published in 1919
- The Road Home by Dashiell Hammett
- The Shadow by Maxwell Grant -- Who knows what evil lurks in
the hearts of men? Almost 300 of the full-length novels published monthly
in the Shadow's pulp magazine
- Doc Savage by Kenneth Robeson (largely Lester Dent) -- Over
100 of the chronicles of the Man of Bronze.
- The works of Abraham Merritt -- classic tales that combine fantasy,
science fiction, and horror: Dwellers in the Mirage, The Face in
the Abyss, The Metal Monsters, The Moon Pool
- Many more!
Poetry
- Alexander Pope
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson
- Carl Sandburg
- Edna St. Vincent Millay
- Emily Dickenson
- John G. Neihardt
- Joyce Kilmer
- Robert Browning
- Robert Frost
- T.S. Eliot
- William Butler Yeats
- Many more!
Memoware
The Memoware library is another place
to find good Palm e-books, though it tends to be a bit more of a grab bag
than Black Mask. Users submit e-books in whatever formats they like, and Memoware
sorts and organizes them. Most of what's on Memoware can also be found on
Black Mask.
Baen Free Library
The Baen Free Library is an exception
to the rule that all free e-books have to be musty old public-domain tomes.
Baen sees an advantage in making some of its novels available for free,
as a method of advertising and gaining publicity to sell more print books.
So far, it seems to be working.