A year ago, Apple began selling The Beatles’ catalogue of music on iTunes. Now, twelve months and many millions of downloads later, Apple is giving away The Beatle’s Yellow Submarine as a free ebook.
It’s not just any ebook. Based on the 1968 film, this ebook features animated illustrations, 14 video clips from the original film, audio functionality that magically turns the book into an audio book, and various interactive elements. You can “read” the book (download it here) on any iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. Our apologies in advance if you use other devices.
The Yellow Submarine will be added to our collection of Free eBooks, which features 250 classics, including texts by Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Joyce, Nabokov, Austen, Nietzsche and others. Also don’t miss our equally large collection of Free Audio Books.
Time to resurrect another suddenly relevant item we first mentioned back in 2009…
Between 1968 and 1972, Stewart Brand published The Whole Earth Catalog. For Kevin Kelly, the Catalog was essentially “a paper-based database offering thousands of hacks, tips, tools, suggestions, and possibilities for optimizing your life.” For Steve Jobs, it was a “Bible” of his generation, a life ‑transforming publication. Speaking to Stanford graduates in 2005, in what Ken Auletta has called the “Gettysburg Address of graduation-speechism,” Jobs explained why he drew inspiration from this intellectual creation of the 60s counterculture:
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
The good news is that The Whole Earth Catalog and some related publications are available online. You can read them for free, or download them for a fee. We suggest diving in right here, in Fall 1968, where it all begins. Enjoy.…
Get ready for it. This week, Knopf will release Paulo Coelho’s latest novel, Aleph. And we’re taking bets on three questions. How many copies will be legally sold? (The Alchemist has sold more than 65 million copies.) How many copies will be pirated and given away? And to what extent will the circulation of illegal copies actually benefit legit sales?
In recent years, Coelho has become something of a willing conspirator in the pirating of his own work. Sometimes he links on his own blog to pirated copies floating around the web. Other times he makes the texts available (in multiple languages) in a nice shareable widget.
Coelho explains how his adventures in self-pirating got underway in a Q&A appearing in yesterday’s New York Times.
Q. You’ve also had success distributing your work free. You’re famous for posting pirated version of your books online, a very unorthodox move for an author.
A. I saw the first pirated edition of one of my books, so I said I’m going to post it online. There was a difficult moment in Russia; they didn’t have much paper. I put this first copy online and I sold, in the first year, 10,000 copies there. And in the second year it jumped to 100,000 copies. So I said, “It is working.” Then I started putting other books online, knowing that if people read a little bit and they like it, they are going to buy the book. My sales were growing and growing, and one day I was at a high-tech conference, and I made it public.
Q. Weren’t you afraid of making your publisher angry?
A. I was afraid, of course. But it was too late. When I returned to my place, the first phone call was from my publisher in the U.S. She said, “We have a problem.”
Q. You’re referring to Jane Friedman, who was then the very powerful chief executive of HarperCollins?
A. Yes, Jane. She’s tough. So I got this call from her, and I said, “Jane, what do you want me to do?” So she said, let’s do it officially, deliberately. Thanks to her my life in the U.S. changed.
The rest of the interview continues here. And, in the meantime, you can find several Coelho books catalogued in our collection of Free eBooks.
Every year, thousands of American high school students read a common selection of great novels — classics loved by young and old readers alike. Today, we have selected 20 of the most popular books and highlighted ways that you can download versions for free, mostly as free audio books and ebooks, and sometimes as movies and radio dramas. You will find more great works — and sometimes other digital formats — in our twin collections: 600 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices and 550 Free Audio Books. So please give them a good look over, and if we’re missing a novel you want, don’t forget Audible.com’s 14 day trial. It will let you download an audio book for free, pretty much any one you want.
1984 by George Orwell: Read Online
Although published in 1949, 1984 still captures our imagination generations later because it offers one of the best literary accounts of totalitarianism ever published. And it’s simply a great read.
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley: eText — Free Radio Dramatization (by Huxley himself)
Little known fact. Huxley once taught George Orwell French at Eton. And, years later his 1931 classic, Brave New World, is often mentioned in the same breath with 1984 when it comes to great books that describe a dystopian future.
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley - Free ebook — Free Audio Book (MP3) — Radio Drama version (1938) — Movie
Mary Shelley started writing the great monster novel when she was only 18 and completed it when she was 21. The 1823 gothic novel is arguably one of your first works of science fiction.
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad: Free eBook — Free Audio Book (iTunes) — Radio Dramatization by Orson Welles (MP3)
More than 100 years after its publication (1902), Conrad’s novella still offers the most canonical look at colonialism and imperialism. So powerful was its influence that Orson Welles dramatized it in 1938, and the book also famously inspired Coppola’s Apocalypse Now in 1979.
Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen – Free eBook — Free Audio Book (iTunes)
Jane Austen’s 1813 novel remains as popular as ever. To date, it has sold more than 20 million copies, and, every so often, it finds itself adapted to a new film, TV or theater production. A must read.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain — Free eBook — Free Audio Book (iTunes)
When you think Huckleberry Finn, you think Great American Novel. It was controversial when it was first published in 1884, and it remains so today. But nonetheless Twain’s classic is a perennial favorite for readers around the world.
The Call of the Wild by Jack London — Free eBook — Free Audio Book (iTunes) The Call of the Wild, first published in 1903, is regarded as Jack London’s masterpiece. It’s “a tale about unbreakable spirit and the fight for survival in the frozen Alaskan Klondike.”
The Crucible by Arthur Miller - Free Audio Book from Audible.com
Arthur Miller’s 1952 play used the Salem witch trials of 1692 and 1693 to offer a commentary on McCarthyism that tarnished America during the 1950s. Today, The Crucible occupies a central place in America’s literary canon.
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck — Free Audio Book from Audible.com
This 1939 novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and later helped Steinbeck win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. It’s perhaps the most important book to give literary expression to the Great Depression.
The Odyssey by Homer – Free eBook — Free Audio Book
The Western literary tradition begins with Homer’s epic poems The Iliad (etext here) and The Odyssey, both written some 2800 years ago. It has been said that “if the Iliad is the world’s greatest war epic, then the Odyssey is literature’s grandest evocation of everyman’s journey through life.” And that just about gets to the heart of the poem.
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway - Free Audio Book from Audible.com
It was Hemingway’s last major work of fiction (1951) and certainly one of his most popular, bringing many readers into contact with Hemingway’s writing for the first time.
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane — Free eBook — Free Audio Book (iTunes) — Free Movie
This Civil War novel won what Joseph Conrad called “an orgy of praise” after its publication in 1895, and inspired Ernest Hemingway and the Modernists later. The novel made Stephen Crane a celebrity at the age of 24, though he died only five years later.
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne – Free eBooks – Free Audio Book — Movie
Though set in Puritan Boston between 1642 and 1649, Hawthorne’s magnum opus explores “the moral dilemmas of personal responsibility, and the consuming emotions of guilt, anger, loyalty and revenge” that were relevant in 1850 (when the book was published). And they remain so today.
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee — Free Audio Book from Audible.com
Harper Lee’s 1960 novel takes an incisive look at attitudes toward race and class in the Deep South during the 1930s. It won the Pulitzer Prize a year later.
Note: We listed Audible.com as an option when books were still under copyright.
Meanwhile, educators don’t miss our collection of Free Courses. It features many free Literature courses, including courses on American literature.
With Labor Day behind us, it’s officially time to head back to school. That applies not just to kids, but to you. No matter what your age, no matter where you live, no matter what your prior level of education, you can continue deepening your knowledge in areas old and new. And it has never been easier. All you need is a computer or smart phone, an internet connection, some free time, and our free educational media collections. They’re available 24/7 and constantly updated:
Free Online Courses: Right now, you can download free courses (some in video, some in audio) created by some of the world’s leading universities — Stanford, Oxford, Yale, Harvard, UC Berkeley, MIT and others. The courses cover pretty much every subject — from philosophy, literature and history, to physics, computer science, engineering and psychology. The collection features about 400 courses in total. And while you can’t take these courses for credit, the amount of personal enrichment offered by these lectures is endless.
Free Textbooks: Another tool for the lifelong learner. This collection brings together roughly 150 free textbooks authored by professors (and some high school teachers) across the globe. The collection will particularly benefit those interested in deepening their knowledge in economics, computer science, mathematics, physics and biology.
Free Language Lessons: Ours is an increasingly globalized world, and it certainly pays to know more than one language. With the free audio lessons listed here, you can learn the basics of Spanish, French and Italian (the languages traditionally taught in American schools). Or you can start boning up on Mandarin, Brazilian Portuguese and other languages spoken by the new world powers. Taken together, you can Learn 40 Languages for Free.
Free Audio Books: This free collection gives you the ability to download audio versions of important literary works. During your downtime, you can listen to short stories by Isaac Asimov, Raymond Carver, Jorge Luis Borges, and Philip K. Dick. Or you can settle into longer works by Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Friedrich Nietzsche and James Joyce.
Free eBooks: Once again, it’s free literary works. But this time you can download e‑texts to your computer or digital reader. Franz Kafka, George Orwell, Gertrude Stein, Edgar Allan Poe, Marcel Proust and Kurt Vonnegut. They’re all on the list. And so too are The Harvard Classics, a 51 volume series of enduring works.
Great Science Videos: This list pulls together some of our favorite science videos on the web. It features about 125 videos, covering astronomy & space travel, physics, psychology and neuroscience, religion, technology and beyond.
Intelligent YouTube Sites: Have you ever wanted to separate the wheat from the chaff on YouTube? This list will give you a start. It features over 100 YouTube channels that deliver high quality educational content. Along similar lines, you may want to visit our collection of Intelligent Video Sites. Same concept but applied to sites on the web.
Cultural Icons: If you’ve ever wanted to see great thinkers, artists and writers speaking on video in their own words, this list is for you. It has Borges and Bowie, Coltrane and Coppola, Ayn Rand and Noam Chomsky, Tolstoy and Thomas Edison, among others. 275 cultural icons in total.
Free Movies Online: What better way to get a cultural education than to watch some free cinematic masterpieces, including 15 films with Charlie Chaplin, 22 early films by Alfred Hitchcock, 25 Westerns with John Wayne, and a number of Soviet classics by Andrei Tarkovsky. The list of 400+ films goes on. And so does your cultural education.…
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The new ebook offers a “comprehensive guide to learning online and charting a personalized path to an affordable credential,” and it comes complete with some handy-sounding tutorials: how to write a personal learning plan, how to teach yourself online, how to build your personal learning network, 7 ways to get college credit without taking a college course, etc.
The book also smartly features a long list of open educational resources, where the author was nice enough to give us a small mention.
You can read The Edupunks’ Guide to a DIY Credentialon Scribd, or alternatively you can download it in multiple formats (PDF, Kindle, ePub, RTF, etc.) at the bottom of this page.
We told you this was coming, and now it’s here. The British Library has started to release 60,000+ texts from the 19th century in digital format. And they’re getting rolled out with the release of a new iPad app. (If you have any problems downloading the app, try doing it directly from the app store on your iPad.)
The upside: The new app currently features 1,000 works, including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist and other British classics. The collection gives you scans of the original editions. So you can read the works as they originally appeared.
The downside: The app won’t be free for long. Eventually, you’ll have to pay. So get in while you can, or just skim through our collection of Free eBooks and Audio Books. All classics, all the time…
To date, Google Books has scanned 50,000 books from the 16th and 17th centuries. And by working with great European libraries (Oxford University Library and the National Libraries of Florence and Rome, to name a few), the Mountain View-based company expects to index hundreds of thousands of pre-1800 titles in the coming years.
Traditionally, most historical texts have been scanned in black & white. But these newfangled scans are being made in color, giving readers anywhere the chance to read older books “as they actually appear” and to appreciate the “great flowering of experimentation in typography that took place in the 16th and 17th centuries.”
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Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
A year ago, Apple began selling The Beatles’ catalogue of music on iTunes. Now, twelve months and many millions of downloads later, Apple is giving away The Beatle’s Yellow Submarine as a free ebook.
