Sorry for the delay in posting, folks. Jury duty ate my Monday and preparing things ahead of time so that I could give up my Monday to the justice process took the rest of the weekend. Still -- I should be more or less back on track now, but if you think this post is a bit sketchy -- well, it is, just a bit. Feel free to add your thoughts in the comments, as always, if you think I've missed something!

So this week I came across the Feedbooks site. This is a site based out of France, with, to judge from their About page, a five-person management/development/system team. Which makes the site really impressive -- it's cleanly designed, easy to navigate, and reasonably self-explanatory. Perhaps this makes it a vote in favor of keeping the management and design team small!

There are two categories of books you can expect to find here: self-published and public domain. Each public domain book file is tagged with a note as to the specific copyright provisions which allow it to be reproduced on the site and offered free of charge. I only checked out a few files to see what the .pdf download quality was like (excellent with a very short download time) and the copyright notices were pretty short. I'd imagine that they might get rather labryinthine if they start talking about more than a couple countries at a time.

Downloads are free and, unless you want a customized .pdf file, you don't have to register to get them. I didn't register for the sake of this brief review post, but as far as I could tell, registering was free. You can download files in Epub, Mobipocket/Kindle, or .pdf. Lacking any ebook reader, I don't know what the quality of the Epub or Mobipocket files is; to judge from the .pdfs, I'd say they're likely to be quite good.

Browsing is a little awkward at first, but once you get used to it, it's not too bad. You can search the whole site, or go through books sorted by categories -- "Thriller," "War," "Psychology," "Adventure" and the like. For the public domain books, you can search by author, category, and whether the book is a new upload or particularly popular. Obviously, author isn't so helpful for the self-published books, so you can only get to those via the global search or by "New & Popular," new, or popular categories. Really, I had the best luck just finding one book I was interested in and then going through the books linked to that one. You can also find a user who has "favorited" books you like and browse through their collection. Presumably you can create your own collection if you have a user account.

Given that the site focusses on public domain or self-published books, there's an odd combination of stuff to be found. On the public domain side, there's a lot of nineteenth century material -- Wuthering Heights, The Railway Children, Crock of Gold and the like -- that are solidly out of copyright. On the self-published side, there are a lot of novels and short story collections.

If you're looking for the latest bestseller, obviously this site won't do it for you. But if you're a student looking for a cheaper way to get through an English class or in need of a text for a citation, or looking to fill in your "classic reading" list, this site could be really helpful.