Mar 26

iBooks Store Loaded with Project Gutenberg Titles at Launch

Posted in: e-books, Media Players, Today's Chili

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When Apple opens up its iBooks Store for business on the iPad, the shelves will be fully stocked. According to a screen-shot posted at iPhone software blog App Advice, iBooks will contain many free, public-domain titles from Project Gutenberg.

Project Gutenberg takes out-of-copyright texts and, using an army of volunteers, turns them into free e-books. You can download them, print them or read them on a range of applications already on the iPhone: Stanza can pull directly from the catalog, and the very pretty Eucalyptus is nothing but Gutenberg titles, rendered in lovely, paper-like detail.

It makes a lot of sense for Apple to load up on these free titles, although we don’t expect the full range of 30,000 books to be available at launch. All Project Gutenberg titles are in plain text format, with only a subset in the iBooks-native EPUB format. Conversion is simple, but we’re certain Apple is checking each one to make sure it’s up to standard.

And yes, we know you could download, convert and import the books yourself, but with iBooks, the App Store and the iTunes Store, one-click simplicity is kind of the point.

iPad iBooks Features The Gutenberg Project Catalog [App Advice]

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