Gutenberg Book Club

You coasted through lit class and you found that the best place to make up for lost sleep was history. Hey Cs get degrees and so did you!

But now you’re with friends at dinner talking about the renaissance and you’re saying “Rena what?”

[Speaking French] Renaissance. Really, you are stupid.

You’re with the smart successful crowd but finding that you’re not really smart yourself. We can help with that.

You can make up far all that lost education or augment the colossal brain you already have and you can do it without a classroom, a library, or even a text book.

It’s called Project Gutenberg and just like its namesake it has made an enourmous body of knowledge available to people everywhere. Check out gutenberg.org – It’s a website where you can download literally thousands of literary works that are in the public domain. And that means they are all free.

Print is dead. Except on the Internet where it’s alive again. You might call it a re-birth… maybe. [Laughs]

And these aren’t those really dumb sounding books that no one checks out at the library – These are cool books like: Amusements in Mathematics, Manual of Surgery Volume one. Sixth Edition and The Encyclopedia of Needlework. Wait that’s the wrong list hold on.

How about the Art of War, The Iliad, and the World’s best poetry. Come on guys. World’s best poetry… she hasn’t read it. Also the collective works of Edgar Allan Poe, Jane Austin, Mark Twain, and Rudyard Kipling. Just to name a few.

It’s not going to have much about cutting edge technology or the latest news or celebrity gossip but tha’s what the rest of the internet is for.

Now you may be saying “big deal” – free downloadable books online. Actually there are a couple of real advantages to having books in a digital format. It’s much easier and faster to search them as well pasting quotes into emails, papers, etc. And you won’t pull out your back when it comes time to move them because you can warehouse libraries full of books on a DVD or a CD. You can even download load versions that work on your smartphone or PDA and take them everywhere you go.

I’ll never be bored again because I have more books on here then I could read in a lifetime. Wait that sounds kind of boring. I’ll probably be bored but very well informed.

And using the information I find in Machiavelli’s “The Prince” I’m going to take over the internet. Nerd Power!

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