When it was announced that items on iBooks would be in ePub format, my first thought was to the Project Gutenberg library. For those who don’t know, Project Gutenberg has, for the past 40 years, been slowly digitizing literary works which have entered the public domain. As of last December, there were over 30,000 items in their collection. Those 30,000 free books are now easily-viewable on your iPad.

The prospect of Project Gutenberg books on the iPad excites me. In the early 90s, I collected books from their collection and made them available on my BBS. There weren’t that many books in the PG library since they had to be manually entered. Still, it was delightful to have even those few books available for free. If I buy an iPad (generation two, naturally), you can bet that I’ll again make heavy use of the PG library.