Although I do not currently own a Kindle 3, the device has already changed my life.
Recently, I found out that the company offers free “Kindle for PC” software, which allows anyone to read books encoded for the Kindle on any PC.
As it turns out, I am an avid reader of US civil war history, and I much prefer contemporaneous accounts of eye witnesses to the dry and dull “histories” typically available in a bookshop or in a local public library.
Lucky for me that my subject of interest escapes the shackles imposed by copyright law! The kinds of books I am most interested in have long ago, thankfully, passed into the public domain.
And also lucky for me that a few major organizations, like Google and the Internet Archive, have digitized a wide selection of books in the public domain, and made them available in an equally wide variety of electronic formats, like Mobi (for the Kindle) and PDF.
I am now able to find, in a matter of just moments, free digitized online original works that I have long thought about reading for decades but never actually read, such as the Memoirs of Generals Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan, Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy by Jefferson Davis, The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane, and Touched with Fire by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
What a joy! It is like having one of the best university libraries just a keyboard away!
This technology has definitely changed my life for the better... and I anticipate it will also change yours!
Recently, I found out that the company offers free “Kindle for PC” software, which allows anyone to read books encoded for the Kindle on any PC.
As it turns out, I am an avid reader of US civil war history, and I much prefer contemporaneous accounts of eye witnesses to the dry and dull “histories” typically available in a bookshop or in a local public library.
Lucky for me that my subject of interest escapes the shackles imposed by copyright law! The kinds of books I am most interested in have long ago, thankfully, passed into the public domain.
And also lucky for me that a few major organizations, like Google and the Internet Archive, have digitized a wide selection of books in the public domain, and made them available in an equally wide variety of electronic formats, like Mobi (for the Kindle) and PDF.
I am now able to find, in a matter of just moments, free digitized online original works that I have long thought about reading for decades but never actually read, such as the Memoirs of Generals Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan, Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy by Jefferson Davis, The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane, and Touched with Fire by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
What a joy! It is like having one of the best university libraries just a keyboard away!
This technology has definitely changed my life for the better... and I anticipate it will also change yours!
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