World E-Book Fair! July 4 - August 4, 2006

July 4th to August 4, 2006 marks a month long celebration of the 35th anniversary of the first step taken towards today's eBooks, when the United States Declaration of Independence was the first file placed online for downloading in what was destined to be an electronic library of the Internet. Today's eBook library has a total of over 100 languages represented.

The World eBook Fair welcomes you to absolutely free access to a variety of eBook unparalleled by any other source. 1/3 million eBooks await you, all free of charge for the month from July 4 - August 4, 2006, and then 1/2 million eBooks in 2007, 3/4 million in 2008, and ONE million in 2009.
Ten times as many eBooks are available from private eBook sources, without the media circus that comes with 100 billion dollar media mavens such as Google. The World eBook Fair has created a library of wide ranging sample of these eBooks, totaling 1/3 million. Here are eBooks from nearly every classic author on the varieties of subjects previously only available through the largest library collections in the world. Now these books are yours for the taking, free of charge, to keep for the rest of your lives.

This event is brought to you by the oldest and largest free eBook source on the Internet, Project Gutenberg, with the assistance of the World eBook Library, the providers of the largest collection, and a number of other eBook efforts around the world. The World eBook Library normally charges $8.95 per year for online access, and allows unlimited permanent downloading. During The World eBook Fair all these books are available free of charge through a gateway at http://www.gutenberg.org

Follow the link in the title to link to the World E-book Fair site itself.

Project Gutenberg Events calendar link
You can also sign up to help Project Gutenberg post more out-of-copyright books by being a proofreader at this page. Just read a page a day! Also see their list of books, and more.

Boston Globe article on E-book Fair link
"Free chapter added to saga of e-books," by David Mehegan.

Efforts to establish a commercial e-book marketplace have stumbled. Attempts to sell hand-held readers failed because they were clumsy and delicate, downloadable books were few, and fees were high. Google recently announced a plan to make millions of books searchable online, but the company has faced opposition from publishers outraged over potential copyright infringement. Attempts to reach publishers and booksellers last night were unsuccessful.

In the World eBook Fair, the books can be downloaded and read on almost any kind of computer -- even a cellphone or PDA . The idea is not merely to lend or rent access to the book but to give it away so that it can be kept in a library, copied, or shared with friends.

Hart* said the major flaw with previous attempts to sell e-books was the device. ``Those readers were dinosaurs before they were born," he said. ``This generation grew up on Game Boy. The screen of a cellphone is fine for them. The iPod had been out only a week when someone wrote a program so you could read our books on it."

* Michael Hart, Project Gutenberg's founder

Read the full article for more. Yay!