Monday, April 10, 2006

Free Reading, Listening, Viewing

Free reading, listening, and viewing on the Internet.

Yesterday our local newspaper ran an article on free or near free sources on the Internet. I thought I would key them in once so other people can find them and add one of my favorites, missed by the article author. A really interesting site for those without sight is www.librivox.org. At this site you can get books for listening or volunteer to read for others.

Good old Wiki has two places where you may find interesting or necessary material. The first has books, speeches, essays etc by people you may want to reference sometime (especially for students!). Wiki also has books in several languages. Now you can read some books as originally written.

The Internet is a great archive and now there is a site dedicated to archiving of interesting items such as old cartoons, feature films etc. Go check it out.

Of course there is the famous Project Guttenberg. Go get yourself a classic to read today or this week or whenever. There are only 17,000 items to choose from, including the book I tortured by book group into reading once, Ulysses by James Joyce. My suggestions are now taken with a large grain of salt.

The author left out the Internet Public Library, but it has books for various age levels and displays just as if you walked into a library.

So if you are homebound or just curious or you just have to look at something new today, try these places. Oh, if you have a young person around, note there is not an excuse for getting to the library for a book, but do keep an extra ream of paper on hand if that person has to read on paper!