Sorry about the empty space where my post should have been last week, folks -- there was minor-but-annoying illness in the household. But I can now look at a computer screen again without pain so, allons-y!

The site for discussion this week is called ManyBooks.net. I found it by following links from a SFSignal "free fiction" list -- I talked about the SFSignal site a couple of weeks ago -- a great resource if you're into genre stuff.

Anyway, ManyBooks.net is an impressive one-man project run by Matthew McClintock largely from free, public domain ebooks provided by Project Gutenberg:

Many of the etexts are from the November, 2003 Project Gutenberg DVD, which contains the entire Project Gutenberg archives except for the Human Genome Project and audio eBooks, due to size limitations, and the Project Gutenberg of Australia eBooks, due to copyright.

McClintock writes that as of July 2004, most Gutenberg texts are usually available via ManyBooks.net within a week of their release. The site also houses works licensed under Creative Commons from other sources.

The ManyBooks site is clean, easy to navigate, searchable by author, title, genre, and language. You can also browse by what books other users of the site have recommended. There's a plain vanilla search box -- accessible from the main page -- and an advanced search which lets you narrow down by author, title, sub-title, year, language, and category. The categories range pretty widely, and let you get fairly specific: you can choose from things as general as "Adventure" and as specific as "post-1930."

You can use the site without registering, but registration is free and lets you keep track of what you've read or want to read and share what you're reading via an RSS feed, rather like Goodreads.

The ebooks themselves can be downloaded in 25 different formats, including .pdf, .html, Kindle, and Sony eReader. There are lots of others, I promise, including Audiobook which is pretty cool.I'm not sure if every book comes complete with an audiobook version, but it's definitely worth checking out if you're like me and use audiobooks for commutes or boring periods at work.

I downloaded a couple of texts from Louisa May Alcott (I was trying to remember a quotation from her Eight Cousins and the site had the right book at the right time!) and Robert W. Chambers, playing mostly with the .pdf and custom .pdf formats and they're not exactly wildly exciting to look at (what .pdf is, really?), but they were stable files, opened on multiple machines, and the custom .pdf let me choose font, font size, and margins. Those options really help me out since for a lot of online reading I depend on the Readability widget from Arc90 labs and that's not something that works with a .pdf file.

On the whole, fiddling around with ManyBooks.net was a great experience. The site was stable and easy to use; the downloads were fast and "as advertised."