I was interested to see on the home page of ebooks.com the book "The Shack" as this was the book that we bought for our pastors and leaders in the church for Christmas. I heard that this book was a #1 New York times best seller, so it must be a good read! (I haven't read it yet!). Apparently there are 130,000 popular, professional and academic ebooks from the world's leading publishers available for the reader to access.
I was quite chuffed when I was successfully able to post an excerpt of this book onto the blog! It was easy to post on my blog as it supplied some straight-forward guidelines about whether to use a small widget and large widget and even the fact that some blogs don't recognise Java script - which was a very useful comment.
I clicked on to Project Guttenburg and decided to investigate the "Top 100 EBooks. What did I discover? On the 2 February 2009, 96,000 odd EBooks were downloaded! WOW!
Top 100 EBooks yesterday - 3rd February 2009 :
The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) by J. Arthur Thomson (955)
Manners, Customs, and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period by P. L. Jacob (676)
Illustrated History of Furniture by Frederick Litchfield (509)
Searchlights on Health by B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols (367)
The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana by Vatsyayana (347)
History of the United States by Charles A. Beard and Mary Ritter Beard (326)
Our Day by William Ambrose Spicer (310)
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (307)
Ulysses by James Joyce (274)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (269)
The Beginner's American History by D. H. Montgomery (266)
General Science by Bertha M. Clark (266)
Woman as Decoration by Emily Burbank (258)
The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English by Ray Vaughn Pierce (257)
Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany by Douglas Houghton Campbell (234)
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (229)
The Practice and Science of Drawing by Harold Speed (222)
The Mafulu by Robert Wood Williamson (218)
Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome by E.M. Berens (218)
Discoverers and Explorers by Edward R. Shaw (215)
Very interesting to see the types ofbooks people are downloading. There are real "classics" such as Pride and Prejudice, Huckleberry Finn, and Alice in Wonderland, as well as books on American history, science and even the karma sutra! Very interesting!
When it came to the most popular authors it was a closely fought race between Charles Dickens and Mark Twain, followed by Sir Arthur conan Doyle, William Shakespeare and Jane Austen.
Our last optional discovery exercise is to find out about Amazon's kindle. As I am one of the trainers with the "Best Sellers", I am already aware of the features of the Kindle. It is a wonderful gadget that combines the features of a book in terms of it's dimension and shape with the convenience of a computer where you can download a book to read and scroll down the pages. I haven't seen anyone with one in New Zealand yet, but give this invention a few moe years and it may become as popular as the personal computer - who knows!
If you want to check out this new innovation click on the link below:
http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Amazons-Wireless-Reading-Device/dp/B000FI73MA
That's it for now! Signing off.....
Jesus Freak
