Brandon Vogt previously posted a list Fr. John McCloskey’s ‘Catholic Lifetime Reading Plan. Now he has updated it to link to ebook versions on Amazonin his post Building a Catholic eBook Library on the Cheap.
The Lifetime reading plan is a pretty decent list with some notable exceptions, but you can never come up with a perfect list of this type. I’ve read the majority of the books listed and so can concur. Brandon Vogt also lists some other sources for free ebooks related to the faith.
Though a notable one he left out is Project Gutenberg which has a wealth of Catholic material considering that most classics our out of copyright. Project Gutenberg also has the books in multiple ebook and just plain text/html formats all of which our free. Many of the books Brandon has listed as not being free on the Amazon Kindle store are actually free at Project Gutenberg.
For those with Nooks, Barnes & Nobles does have very similar prices on the books listed for the Kindle. In fact it seems to me there is a lot of price fixing going on in the ebook world.
To his list of ebook resources I would also add Aquinas & More which does offer ebooks for downloads. There is also the The MOST Theological Collection which has the complete works of Fr. William G. Most available online – though not in ready ebook format.
A related area is Catholic Audiobooks. Since many of these classics are on Project Gutenberg this means that sites such as LibriVox have made available audiobook versions of these titles done by volunteers. There is also Maria Lectrix “public domain audiobook podcast – for people with catholic tastes” which has many spiritual classics.
2 comments
Thanks for mentioning us in the list. The one problem with Gutenberg is that no proofing is done so depending on the quality of the original you can have a garbled mess. You also have no linking to chapters.
Jeff: Thanks for the link, and your additions are great. I wasn’t aware that you could download “.mobi” versions of the Gutenberg books. I thought they were just straight text files or PDFs.
ian>/b>: That’s a very good point. For many important books–or modern titles–I’m willing to shell out a few dollars to buy an edited, formatted version. But for some of the classics, especially works of literature, the free versions often suffice.