How to Read 20,000 Fiction Books for Free (Legally)
Hi, there!
In Kaliningrad, right behind the theater, there is a little park. One of its amenities is the statue of Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
Close to it is a little free library.
I've borrowed and read quite a few books from it. After a while I realized that this box solves the problem of discovery of new books. Thanks to this box I regularly find books which
- I enjoy enough to read through them and
- would never actively search for.
Here is an example. Once I found in that little free library a book on control systems on ships from the 1970s. Believe it or not, I've found it interesting enough to read it through. This book was a good match for me.
The miracle of this little free library is that it connected me to that book. I would never actively search for it.
This got me thinking: Can I replicate this on the internet? Can I create something which allows bookworms to find literature they enjoy, but would never actively search for?
One obvious solution is Project Gutenberg. On its web site there are several sections where you can search for books by their titles, authors, or genres. But these options require you to know what you are looking for. It is impossible to discover good, but obscure writers in this way.
Then there is the index of all available works. This is already closer to what I want, but not quite. If you find a particular book interesting, you need to manually write the correct URL based on its number. It's not the end of the world, but the beauty of a little free library is the ease of looking into books – you just grab one and look inside.
I want something where you can doomscroll until you find a book interesting enough to read. I want a giant pile of books which bookworms can dig through.
I extracted all the fiction books in English (prose only) and put the links to them on several pages. Here is the first one. If you open the link you will see a page with links to several books available on Project Gutenberg.
Technically they are sorted by their titles, but because they are inconsistent you can say these books are presented there in a random order. That's very similar to the little free library in a park. And this is how you can read over 20,000 English fiction books for free.
In the future, I intend to find new ways to discover good, but obscure books. Subscribe to my SubStack to learn about them.
P.S.: If you are a researcher or programmer and want to find out how I created those pages, read this tutorial.