Books Worth Reading

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I will admit that I love technology. I’m one of those people who can’t imagine life without the Internet. Technology is my livelihood and my passion.

But I am a luddite when it comes to books.

I can see some applications for e-books. Reference books, books that you use mainly to look things up rather than read in a linear fashion, would be good candidates. But for reading I want real books. Books that take up room on my shelves. Books that accumulate in piles in my bedroom, waiting to be read. Books that I can hoard and dole out like treasure. Books that smell like musty paper. Books that get stained and dog-eared from use. Books that I can look at and remember the emotions I felt when I was reading them. I do not want to lie in bed at night curled up around a Kindle. I even prefer to cook out of real books, despite the millions of free recipes online.

I know this isn’t very green of me (I am a green person). And I am resigned to the fact that e-books are coming, and that I might actually embrace them for my throwaway reading. But I still want my books, dammit.

After saying all that, here are some links to some interesting e-book sites:

• DailyLit - read ebooks through email or RSS
• EcoBrain - green e-books about environmental stuff
• Textbook Revolution – free electronic textbooks

Update: Zawan, a frequent visitor here, just wrote a nice post on ebooks on her blog, with even more good places to locate ebooks.

Do you have a hard time sitting down to read that classic you’ve always been meaning to get to before you die, but you have no problems reading all your email or RSS feeds every morning? Then you should check out the DailyLit service. Classic books are delivered to your email inbox or RSS feed reader in small chunks each morning, so you can read them with your morning cup of coffee. No excuses! It may take you 675 days to get through War and Peace, but at least you can say you read it.

This is a really neat idea. While the public domain books are free, there are also books for sale here that can be delivered electronically. Unfortunately, it worked better in theory than in practice, at least for me. I had to suspend my subscription to Wuthering Heights after I fell woefully far behind (I only read the first installment). But this may be just the way to make reading that great novel more manageable.

Oh, and it’s a community too, so you can discuss what your reading with fellow bibliophiles. (via LifeHacker)