After writing the post below I got to thinking about the sentence I used: … volunteer work like this should be recognized every once in a while. It is really incredible how the e-book community is supported by a cadre of volunteers who seem to want to do nothing but make the reading world better. Some of these sites may be looking for investors or hope to turn into a business some day, but as of today they are free to the public. Here are a few that come to mind quickly. I apologize to those I have left out and I hope our readers will mention them in comments to this post.
Project Gutenberg of Australia
Distributed Proofreading Europe
By the way, if anyone reading this has NOT proofread a book for Gutenberg through Distributed Proofreaders, why not make a New Year’s resolution to do so. I’ve done a couple and it’s great fun. You can pick the book you are interested in and do as much, or as little, as you want. Well worth your time and effort.
It is pretty amazing. I got my Cybook knowing I could be happy reading just Project Gutenberg books for years to come. Some of these sites put them into portable formats for us, making them extremely convenient.
And there are current authors making their work available for free too.
I’m glad to have all of them!
Thanks for this post.
You might add Bookshare.org to this list. They have over 30,000 ebooks, many of which were scanned, OCRed, and proofed by volunteers – many of whom are visually-impaired. They also have several thousand ebooks donated by the publishers themselves.
Sadly, these books are not available to the general public due to Section 121 of copyright law. For more information, see http://www.bookshare.org