So I Was Looking for a Copy of Moby Dick Online…

A month or so ago I was looking for a copy of Moby Dick as I had never read it (I think it was mentioned in a movie I watched) and I thought to myself “hey, self, you should read that” and then I thought “hey… I should read other classics too!” I used to love to read novels but never bothered with most of the classics.

So I began to look for free classic books that I could read as PDF files on my iPad and wound up at PlanetEbook.com and found dozens of the most poplar classic novels, including titles such as:

  • 1984
  • A Tale of Two Cities
  • Moby Dick
  • Oliver Twist
  • Paradise Lost
  • The Iliad
  • The Odyssey

…and plenty of others. I used other sites like PlanetPdf.com too and found more ebooks as well… I was hooked. 🙂 I think I ended up with nearly 60 free classic novels. Who doesn’t love free stuff?

I then had the wonderful idea to look for classic poetry and found more than I wanted at PoemHunter.com. I found complete collections for poets like:

  • Robert Frost
  • William Shakespear
  • Emily Dickinson
  • Edgar Allen Poe
  • John Keats

…and plenty of others. I didn’t download everyone, though probably should have as it wouldn’t have taken up too much space at all. Maybe I’ll go back. As I noticed Shakespear’s name I thought it would be a good idea to get his many plays as well–after all they’re classics too–so I downloaded the vast majority of them here: http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/shake.htm.

Then something clicked and this is where I’m having trouble and hope you might be able to help. I thought it would be great to have a serious knowledge preservation resource available on my iPad for SHTF but not about survival info–I have plenty of that–but about knowledge in general; I know, I know these should be hard copies but I figured free is free and on my iPad is better than nothing.

So I began to look for educational resources such as textbooks and, in particular, a current encyclopedia but am having some serious trouble finding anything. I searched extensively online and wound up at Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.org) that offers tens of thousands of ebooks free but, sadly, most of them didn’t seem to be worth much.

I found other sites that offered various math and science textbooks but many of them seemed to be written by PHD nerds and weren’t meant as teaching tools. In particular, I’m looking for textbooks that I can (1) use to teach my kids things they should know and (2) as a reference to for me… kind of like a Google replacement in the form of an extensive encyclopedia. I should say that I did find a few sites that had encyclopedias but they were bit torrent sites and I tend to steer clear of those.

I just looked at the storage space these files used up on iPad and including all of the aforementioned files as well as hundreds of “how to” files and hundreds of survival-related files they take up about 800 MB (less than 1 GB). I think it’s well worth the storage space and my time… now I just have to read them. 😉


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Comments

9 responses to “So I Was Looking for a Copy of Moby Dick Online…”

  1. Steve

    Don”t know if the courses are free online, think so, but the reading lists for many of the courses are, I believe, at MIT and Stanford.

    1. I might look into that too but I’m more interested in community college level courses… I looked at some of the “nerdy” documents and I think my head almost exploded. 😉

  2. You can also get classics and more from the Project Gutenberg website, in many different formats, and all of them DRM free!

    TroutAngler

    1. I’ll have to look there a bit more. Last time I visited I was a bit overwhelmed and didn’t find what I was looking for.

  3. idea

    also, search for “apprentice alf”
    http://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/

    and you can tweak calibre to remove the DRM 🙂

  4. idea

    Search for CK-12 Foundation on Amazon kindle books (free). Install Kindle for PC and download to your PC. Then use a program like Calibre (free) to convert to other formats

    I have gotten many free prep e-books from Amazon (gardening, herbs, seeds, recipes, construction, home health remedies, etc.)

    1. That looks like a good idea. Thank you!

    1. Thanks! I’ll look into it.

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