Chat Room: Yours for the Taking
RSSThousands of free books are now available online
By Walter Minkel -- School Library Journal, 06/01/2004
I recently read about a school district in Texas that's supplying its fifth- and sixth-grade students with laptops. Along with electronic copies of textbooks, the laptops will also contain a "library" of about 2,000 books—"classics of Western civilization"—packaged by Vital Source Technologies and sold for about $200 per computer. The package includes a handy software program that compresses the books into a space of about half a gigabyte, along with a search engine to help students find words and concepts in those books. So far, so good. But when I checked with the North Carolina software company, I learned that these pre-loaded books include titles such as Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. What do I have against these masterpieces? Absolutely nothing. I just hate paying for something that's free for the taking.
The fact is, there are thousands of free books available online, and odds are you can use some of them in your school or library. They don't include modern blockbusters like Harry Potter or Shel Silverstein's poems, but they do include Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Brothers Karamazov, the works of Mark Twain, and, yes, those of Hawthorne and Melville. In other words, they're books that have passed into the public domain—titles that date back to 1923 or earlier.
Perhaps the most popular of the free-book sites is Online Books (onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu), run by John Mark Ockerbloom, a University of Pennsylvania digital library planner. Ockerbloom says that many students—particularly kids who are homeschooled—visit his site frequently, looking for classics such as Tom Sawyer or for old books that aren't easily found in local libraries, like the McGuffey Readers, first published in the 19th century. Online Books also features a worthwhile article by Ockerbloom on the history of banned books. He says that many high school students have used it for research papers, although it concentrates on books for adults—many of them available on the site—that have been banned for being too sexy (such as James Joyce's Ulysses) or for attacking the regime in power. The site also offers a directory of links to many of the other free-book sites, such as the well-known Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.net), which began in 1971, long before there was a Web.
Sites like Online Books, of course, are great for older students who are searching for classics, but what about young kids? Most of the children's books you'll find online, unfortunately, are antiques that appeal to adults rather than today's children. The one bright spot—the International Children's Digital Library (ICDL) (www.icdlbooks.org)—is the best free-book site for kids. ICDL offers new, copyrighted books as well as oldies. And it's the only free-book site with a selection of modern, out-of-print picture books—such as Thacher Hurd's Axle the Freeway Cat (Harper & Row, 1981)—which have been donated to the project by their creators.
Jane White, ICDL's director, says that she's working with Penguin Putnam, HarperCollins, and other children's book publishers—as well as publishers of kids' books in Czech and Serbian—to boost the size and the currency of ICDL's collection. White hopes one day to convince publishers to donate prize-winning books, such as some of the older Caldecott Medal winners, to ICDL. She also hopes that she can persuade more authors and illustrators to donate their out-of-print titles to ICDL. But for now, she says that she's on target to have about 1,000 picture books on the site by the time school starts in September.
Don't hold your breath waiting for more new books to enter the public domain: it won't happen until 2018 at the earliest. That's because the U.S. copyright law was rewritten in 1998 to favor the Sonys, Random Houses, and Microsofts of the world, who stand to lose countless millions if certain songs, books (like A. A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh, which was originally published in 1926), and film characters (like Disney's Mickey Mouse) slip into the public domain.
Even though the selection of free online books is limited (at least for the foreseeable future), they're still fun to browse. And when you need 20 copies of the original Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published in 1900, they're a great no-cost resource.
