Freebooks5000.com This site allows you to download 5000 literary classics for free .You can choose from a variety of titles and categories. All books downloaded are in .txt format. Which means you can open it in MS Word or MS WordPad. No extra software needed. But, before you start your downloading spree, please remember that these are files you’ll have to read from a screen. Obviously this is not as enjoyable as having a book in your hands. You can’t carry it into the train, or into the loo etc. Also it would be bad for your eyes unless you have a great monitor with anti glare, the least flickering and spectacles coated with anti glare. Furthermore, printing the books does not seem like a good idea as some books can be too large and thus expensive to print.
I downloaded the following titles. Each document contains the font Courier New and font size 10. A TALEOF TWO CITIES by Charles Dickens : 239 pages THE CODE OF HAMMURABI : 20 pages IN A STATION OF THE METRO by Ezra Pound is a two-line poem. THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS by Sigmund Freud : 393 pages So printing at the rate of RS 5 per page or Rs 10... well, you do the math. This site may best be suited to download smaller items like plays or poetry, . things that you can read of a screen or even print. Hmmm. So should we rule this site out? not at all. Its great for reference. Suppose you need to search for specific sections in a book, looking for it in a printed book would take a long time. But since these files can be opened in a MS Word you can use the search feature to search for a particular word. This means, no long trips to the library and less time wasted searching for something in particular. You don’t need to buy the books if you need them just for reference, so you save money as well.(This however depends on the availability of the books). Want some quotations for a speech or your project report? A feature on the site allows you to look for quotations based on categories like friendship, love, etc or, you can just type in a keyword in a search engine on the site itself. Not only do you get quotations from books, you can also look for the context in which the sentence has been quoted.
For those who like e cards, you can mail these quotations as e-cards. The one e-card that I sent myself just had a scenic picture and the quotation at the bottom of the picture. No animation or sound. Not very attractive. There’s some fun stuff on this site too. Quizzes, Contests (not a regular feature), and one really interesting feature that allows you to substitute yourself for the characters in a book of your choice (This and some other special features are only available on the on a special CD containing every title on the site). To make your search easy the site contains alphabetically arranged indexes for author, title and even literary category.
In addition to literary works there are categories like Biology and Medicine, History and Biography as well as Government and Economics. Web pages may be a little slow to load due to longer than usual pages but not enough to annoy a person. Double thumbs up to this site! Enjoy!