QUILLBLOG

British Library to offer free downloads of public domain books

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, and Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge are among 65,000 works of 19th-century fiction that the British Library is set to offer as free digital downloads this spring. However, according to an article in the Times Online, the project, which is being funded by Microsoft, will be available only to owners of Amazon’s Kindle. The Times article also indicates that Amazon users will be able to order bound copies of the books, priced between £15 and £20. The printed books, like the scanned e-books, will resemble the originals in the British Library collection, down to their typefaces and illustrations.

From the Times:

Books to be made available will include Victorian classics such as A Strange Story by Edward Bulwer-Lytton and The Story of a Modern Woman by Ella Hepworth Dixon.

Many of the downmarket books known as “penny dreadfuls” will also be made available to the public, including Black Bess by Edward Viles and The Dark Woman by J M Rymer.

Altogether, 35%-40% of the library’s 19th-century printed books – now all digitised – are inaccessible in other public libraries and are difficult to find in second-hand or internet bookshops.

Quillblog wonders whether the solution to this inaccessibility is to allow only those with a specific electronic reading device to download the digital titles. Would it not be better to make the e-books available to everyone, regardless of what e-reader is being employed to view the content?