Send Jim an e-mail . Back to other cybercoverage writers With all the publicity surrounding the release of Stephen King's e-book, Riding the Bullet, one might be tempted to conclude that the electronic distribution of literature is a new phenomenon. Currently, Gutenburg boasts a catalog of more than 2000 public domain titles, and authors represented run from Aesop to Emile Zola, with an average of one new e-text being added each day. The design of Gutenburg's site is so basic as to look unfinished, but visitors don't come here to see the sights. As well as links to Project Gutenburg's history and philosophy, news, and technical info, the home page allows surfers to browse for material by Author or Title, use a keyword search, or even download complete Author and Title lists for off line perusal.
Individual texts are then only a few clicks away.
If, after hunting down a favorite document, you find that your server is too busy to allow a download, you can simply select another from the pull-down menu and go directly to that server's page for the chosen title. Having chosen an author, visitors are taken to a brief biography, and list of works available. MP3Lit offers everything from John Grisham reading his own work and Frank McCourt interpreting James Joyce, to excerpts from The Onion, a rare recording of J.R.R Tolkien reading from The Lord of the Rings, and classic pieces from such New Yorker writers as E.B. White and Dorothy Parker. Like Bartleby, each selection provides a brief biography to accompany the readings, which are available in both MP3 and RealAudio formats. Recordings run from 2 to 20 minutes, so while you might find entire poems or short stories, there are no complete novels here.