Saturday, August 7, 2010

Heard of "Project Gutenberg?"

From Wikipedia: (right click on any link and select "open in another window) to read the complete article.

"Project Gutenberg was started by Michael Hart in 1971 with the digitization of the United States Declaration of Independence.[4] Hart, a student at the University of Illinois, obtained access to a Xerox Sigma V mainframe computer in the university's Materials Research Lab. Through friendly operators, he received an account with a virtually unlimited amount of computer time; its value at that time has since been variously estimated at $100,000 or $100,000,000.[4] Hart has said he wanted to "give back" this gift by doing something that could be considered to be of great value. His initial goal was to make the 10,000 most consulted books available to the public at little or no charge, and to do so by the end of the 20th century"

One of the coolest things on the Gutenberg website is the free audio book offerings.  I down-loaded "The Picture of Dorian Gray" by Oscar Wilde recently.  It's a wonderfully narrated piece of work!  I copied it to my MP3 player and listened at my leisure on walks and roller blade skates over a week or so. 

Would you like to try down loading this classic story too?  Here's how:

  • go to this website: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/26230#downloads
  • scroll down to the table titled "Hand-Crafted Files"
  • there are 13 "audio" files (for the 13 chapters of the novel)
  • starting on the first of the "Audio" files, left click where it says "main site" in the 5th column of the row
  • then, in the dialogue box where is asks if you want to save this file, click  the "save" option
  • In the next, "save as" box, select a suitable library - music, document etc. and create a new folder, title "Dorian Gray" by,
  • Right clicking the library name on the left and selecting "new" then select "folder"
  • a "new folder" will appear under your library title - documents or music that you selected           
  • Rename that "new folder" to "Dorian Gray"
  • save all 13 files in sequence to that folder then transfer the entire folder, if you wish, to your MP3 player for easy summer "reading."
  • then continue browsing the collection!


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