More entertaining than social media
Michael Hart founded Project Gutenberg in 1971. The first document he added was The Declaration of Independence, in December of 1971. It remains book Number One on that site. Since then, he and his volunteers have added 79,231 additional titles (as of today). And since the birth of the internet, the project has made all of these titles accessible to everyone. So if you want to read John Milton's Paradise Lost, you can find it there, in full, for free. It is book Number 20, and has been available since 1991.It was not until 1989 that Hart had ten documents on the service. Book Number 10 is the King James Version of the Bible. An early novel was Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Book 11, added in 2008. Other early additions include Moby Dick, Peter Pan, Aesop's Fables, and Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd.
You get the idea. Classics, and long out of copyright. I am not sure why the book numbers do not exactly line up chronologically. But if I had to guess I would say that early on, the book numbers were assigned before the transcription was undertaken, or finished anyway.
In any case, I guess I have known about Project Gutenberg almost as long as I have known that the internet was a thing. But for me, it was a bit of a novelty. I confess, I am not the biggest reader of classic literature. But if I ever took a hankering to read Dickens' Bleak House, I knew where to find it.
And this went on for many years, really until recently. You see, I am more of a nonfiction reader, which tends to be recently-published and very much under copyright. And thus, not available on Project Gutenberg. On the other hand, I do enjoy a good mystery. And what has happened over the last twenty years is that many of the early twentieth century mystery classics have fallen out of copyright and entered the public domain. That means Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Edgar Wallace, etc. You can now find early works by all of these authors on Project Gutenberg.
It is worth noting that just because a work has entered the public domain does not mean that it will automatically be added to Project Gutenberg. I am not at all sure how they choose their additions, but I am pretty sure that one of their volunteers somewhere must be interested in the work enough to transcribe it. They do not appear to use scans...yet.
So far there are seventeen works by Agatha Christie. She published eighty books, so there are many to follow as they enter the public domain. I have gone back and read a few of these, and not surprisingly, they hold up well.
So if you find yourself endlessly scrolling social media, let me point you to this alternative. I use the Apple Books app, both on my Mac and iPhone. It is almost as easy to use as the Kindle software (I do not have a Kindle device), including, vitally, remembering where you are across devices.