Monday, November 12, 2012

Digital Books


I have been having a bit of fun lately, downloading digital books.  I found several websites that have free downloads of books where the copyrights have expired.  They are old books - many from the early 1900's, but they are interesting to me.

I love the old cookbooks.  You need a bit of an imagination to figure out some of the instructions:  "Take a cupful of flour and a spoon of fat..."   "Cook until it resembles cornmeal mush..."   I particularly like this recipe for butterscotch:

Butter Scotch
1/2 Cupful of Molasses
1/2 Cupful of Sugar
1/2 Cupful of Butter
Boil until it strings. Pour into buttered tin and when cold break into pieces. This is very nice when cooled on snow.

I have downloaded novels and biographies and poetry as well as old cookbooks.  I don't have a Kindle as I just can't justify spending that much money, but I did download a free Kindle Reader that works well on my computer.  Some books I have in a text format.  They are all fun to read.  The only drawback is that it is sort of hard to curl up in a comfy chair to read from a computer that is not a laptop!

I also have built up a library of audio books from some of these same websites.  My computer is located next to my kitchen.  I take a speaker, set it on a little table around the corner from my computer, and listen to books being read to me while I work in my kitchen.  Even though these books are old, they are still interesting and I don't have to go out and buy reading material.  Which is a good thing because for me, being without something to read is a disaster.

Here are some of the websites where I found books:

http://freekindlebooks.org/
http://manybooks.net/
http://www.gutenberg.org/

The  free Kindle for PC came from Amazon.com.

As a person who loves a good sale, I can testify that free is even better, especially when it comes to books.  And given the fact that space is very limited in my apartment, this works well for me.

So go.....download a book.....turn off the TV.....and read something.

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