Announcing Our Second Book

As we're all wrapping up Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, I am pleased to announce our second Classics Book Club Book, The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Once again, this book can conveniently be found online at Project Gutenberg in HTML, Plaintext, EPUB formats and other formats, as well as at your local library. Happy reading!

First edition cover-art from Wikipedia [Source].

Information about our discussion (venue, date, time, etc) to follow, but we're thinking sometime during the week of August 1st! If you have any questions, please leave them in the comments section.

iBooks Ahoy!

Just a brief check-in post to see how everyone's reading progress is going. If you think you'll need more time before the first meeting (June 30th, somewhere), please let us know (I might, if I don't pick up the pace)! Also of note, if slightly off-topic: iOS 4 has been released as a free update, so anyone with an iPhone 3G, 3Gs, or a 3rd Gen (and I think 2nd Gen too) iPod Touch can now get the free iBooks App, and by simply downloading the two "volumes" of Joan of Arc free from Gutenberg (in EPUB format), adding them to your iTunes Library, and synching it to your iOS 4 device, you can read Joan of Arc wherever you go! It's a little screen, but still, if I'm not sure I'll have time to read, and I don't want to lug a big hard-back library book, I can still get a few pages in as long as I have my iPod. Technology! Also, many of Project Gutenberg's free classic books can be found in the iBooks store and downloaded directly onto your iPhone/iPod Touch, or into iTunes.

Book-view, with bookmarks, highlighting, and notes available.

And look at these page-turns! You can see the text through the iPage of this iBook!

Library-view (mine's looking a little barren)

More free Gutenberg books in the iTunes store, available
directly to your iOS device!

Project Gutenberg

Hey all! I wanted to drop a quick note to supplement Danielle's post. Basically, the deal is that there's this really cool website called Project Gutenberg, where there are lots of free "Electronic Books" (or eBooks, to you Myspace usin' punk kids). It's a great source in general, but it will be especially awesome for all of these classics that we'll be reading, because most of them are out of copyright, and on that site in HTML, EPUB, PDF and some other formats too. Our inaugural book, Personal Reflections of Joan of Arc, by Mark Twain, is on there, if any of you kids want to read it online. I for one am reading a copy from the library on the bus, and then reading the online version during breaks at work! Anywho, check Gutenberg out, and happy reading!

A different kind of Guttenberg project, involving a racially insensitive Fisher Stevens and Ally Sheedy.

Welcome to the classics book club!

Our first book is Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc and we will be discussing it on Wednesday, June 30 at a place in DC!