BPN 1356 2 mln+ eBooks for summer for free

You do not know what to do with your summer time? Start reading eBooks. From July 4 till August 4 more than 2 million eBooks are available online and for free through World eBook Fair program! This year the fourth edition will be held of the World eBook Fair.

By giving access to a number of eBook collections people linked to internet can download more than 2 million eBooks for free. The collections available come from the Project Gutenberg, the World Public Library, Digital Pulp Publishing, the Internet Archive and another 100 eBook libraries. Besides public domain books, also modern and commercial eBooks are on offer for free. On an office day more than 1.000 eBooks are produced for eBook Libraries.

100,000 eBooks in het Project Gutenberg
500,000 eBooks on de World Public Library
1,385,000 eBooks in het Internet Archive
250,000 eBooks van eBooks About Everything
17,000 eBooks IMSLP's Music eLibrary
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2,252,000 total

eReader or mobile phone reader
MichaeL Hart, the pioneer of eBooks since 1970, makes an interesting comment on the World Book Fair site. He observes that : “In addition to presenting twice as many books, we are also trying to reach 10x as much of the population by including a number of programs a person can use to read these eBooks on LIKE phones, MP3 players, PDA's, iPods, etc. Think about it this way: There aren't even a million Kindles or Sony's, but there are now ~4 1/2 billion cell phones-- which means the possibility of reading readers via cell phones is larger than any other media. The cell phone is the wave of the future, not, I repeat, NOT the Kindle or Sony approach, for they are only targeting millions, and I should like very much to reach billions of people.

More eBooks In More Languages
The eBooks on offer are mainly in the English language, but other languages are also served like the Top Six list such as: English, Chinese, German, French, Spanish and Urdu. Worldwide there are 250 languages with over a million speakers. With the collection of 2.5 million eBooks the World eBook Fair is trying to reach readers in over half of these. I checked the number of books available from the World eBook Fair in my mother tongue Dutch; the search on the site delivered 42 eBooks in the Dutch language. When I made a search with the local eBook distributor eBook.nl, I found 790 eBooks in the Dutch language listed.

Blog Posting Number: 1356

Tags: eBook, ereader