Online Education

I wanted to take the time to highlight one of the greatest and oldest resources for literature on the Internet, Project Gutenberg. PG is a collection of public domain works digitized and posted for free. PG is the oldest digital library on the internet. Started in 1971 by Michael Hart at the University of Illinois. Hart started the project as an effort to pay back the community for the computer time he was given free of charge at the university.

Today PG contains more than 30,000 items including books, periodicals, and reference works available free of charge to the public. It can easily be searched by author and title, and all the books are readable by anyone with a web browser.

To get you started using PG I wanted to list a few classic publications that are available and currently used in undergrad literature classes. One caveat to keep in mind is that not all books on PG are the current ’scholarly’ edition. The most recent editions of these books would be copyrighted. That said, I have used the texts from PG for school and had no problems.

The List

1. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
2. The Iliad by Homer
3. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
4. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
5. The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci — Complete by Leonardo da Vinci
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
8. Dracula by Bram Stoker
9. The Marvelous Land Of Oz by L. Frank Baum
10. Beowulf
11. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
12. Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
13. The Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce
14. Grimm’s Fairy Tales by Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm
15. The Communist Manifesto by Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx
16. Keats: Poems Published in 1820 by John Keats
17. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
18. Our Day by William Ambrose Spicer
19. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
20. Across Unknown South America by Arnold Henry Savage Landor

This is just a small list of some of the great books available for free at PG.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS