Astounding Stories And Other Great (Free) Stuff

Bit of a domino day today as things fell into place for something that is more than a little useful. Amazon UK have been pushing the launch of the new Kindle e-book, personally I want an iPad but I decided to look at what it did for SWMBO who doesn't want the bells and whistles iPad but might appreciate something she could read all the old books she loves on Project Gutenberg like the Scarlet Pimpernel and Sherlock Holmes (or Raffles which she is currently reading).

Checking formats it seems Gutenberg (and a number of other sites) do free e-books in mobi format (what Kindle uses) so I investigated further checking out a number of 19th century detective books before broadening my search to Edgar Rice Burroughs then seeing what science fiction books Gutenburg had (it seems quite a lot). Amongst the books were some electronic versions of the Astounding Stories short story magazine from 1930 and 31 which looked interesting.

Back to seeing how the Kindle worked I noticed that you could download for free a Kindle reader for your Mac or PC (or iPad!), so interested to see if it worked I downloaded the Mac version and a couple of Astounding Stories and it all works fine. Ok, it is landscape rather than the portrait format of a Kindle or iPad, but the nice things is that the programme adjusts the document to landscape so you don't need to scroll up and down like you do with PDF's just click to the next page when you've read the one you are on.

As it's all free, I'd recommend checking it out, even if you only have a laptop or desk PC, there is a lot of interesting stuff at Gutenberg and this makes it a damn sight easier to read on a computer...