Saving the world, one free ebook at a time, with Forgotten Books

Recently I became aware of an exciting new project that I think has the potential to be of great value to the reading world, Forgotten Books.  They have thousands of titles you will find no where else.  Just to check their claims I did a search on their data base on short stories of the Philippines, one of my central interests, and there are works there not available anywhere else.  

In order to make sure my readers know of this web page, I asked Forgotten Books to do a guest post explaining their service. 

Saving the world, one free ebook at a time, with Forgotten Books - A Guest Post

 

I’d like to answer a couple of questions with this guest post. Firstly, why old books are worth saving and secondly, how our site www.forgottenbooks.org can help you find and enjoy those books.

 

One of the greatest tragedies in publishing is that, with a few exceptions, the life of a book run is very short. Unless you are Charles Dickens or Jane Austen most authors’ work will be published once, maybe make a second run if they are lucky and will be out of print within their own lifetime. Each book represents the dedication of perhaps years of the author’s life, and taken together the books published since Johannes Gutenberg first started up his press represent a significant fraction of humanity’s knowledge.

 

At Forgotten Books our aim is to preserve and make these treasures of the past available to everyone. Despite the self-aggrandising title we don’t think we’re saving the world, but we do make available some books that would otherwise be lost to anyone who can’t fly to visit a specific library. Some of these books have a very small audience, but keep alive skills that would otherwise be lost, for example we have quite a few works on blacksmithing and various types of needlework. Others don’t really need our help (I mentioned Dickens and Austen before) but are included for completeness and because their popularity helps support the lesser known works. My personal favourite books though are in the fiction and folklore sections. These represent the stories of our past, and especially the folktales would once have been common currency through their local culture, although much of that has since been lost. There is so much more out there than Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella! There are folktales from Ireland, the Philippines and Japan for example which follow different story conventions and aesthetics to the Grimm classics. More than just the beautiful stories (and this applies to fiction in general, not just folktales) the way they are written tells us much about the society of the time.

 

So what can Forgotten Books do for you? Well for a start there are over 484000 books stored in its library, so there’s a good chance you can find something you’re interested in. These are on every topic conceivable from science or religion through to genealogy. Each of them has been scanned from the original text and processed to remove marks, check for missing pages and so on to improve ease of reading. Each word has also been checked by OCR software and indexed. This means you can search for a book by its contents (you can also search by title and author), so if you search for “whale” you can find both Moby Dick and a biography of Margaret of France, Duchess of Savoy (although as I’ve not read the second book I don’t know her connection to cetaceans). This index of words is also used in Word Data, a bibliographical analysis tool. This can tell you the most common words pairs in written English (“United States”) and many other fascinating functions, such as the ability to compare the use of words over time and show their first use in text.

 

80 % of each book is readable for free, and full access is available for an extremely cheap subscription (depending on the option chosen it can work out as less than US$0.05 or about £0.03 per book). If you register for a free account you can also receive the free ebook of the day, which is a randomly chosen book available in full every 24 hours.

 

Do you have any favourite books you can find at Forgotten Books? Do you have any questions about it that you’d like to ask? I’ll hang around the comments section to this post after it goes live and see if I can help.

 

Forgotten Books is a small, family run company that was set up in 2007 by Alasdair Forsythe. It is currently directed by Oliver Forsythe from the UK. Glynn Forsythe runs communications for Forgotten Books from his home in Australia.

Glynn Forsythe

End of guest post

Mel u