Last week, prize-winning novelist and occasional bomb-thrower Jonathan Franzen dismissed e-books as lacking a "sense of permanence." Aside from the fact that e-books are very much here to stay and just might revive the book industry — between Dec. 26 and Jan. 1, the most popular format for 84% of USA Today's best selling books was electronic, and sales of e-readers this holiday season were double that of last year — Franzen was overlooking another factor that should be dear to any literary traditionalist's heart: e-books are also keeping the classics alive.
As any Kindle or Nook owner knows, e-reading devices come pre-loaded with at least one free literary classic, and the iBooks app for iPad includes Treasure Island. But that's just the beginning; most works that have passed out of copyright and into the public domain — which includes everything published before 1923 — are available for download, free of charge. Before e-readers, if you wanted to own a classic you had to spend money on a produced physical artifact, whereas today the complete works of William Shakespeare can cost you as much as you're paying to read this article.
Comprehensive statistics on downloads of free e-book editions of the classics are difficult to come by, but just one popular and long-lived resource, Project Gutenberg, has posted that more than 4.5 million e-book files have been downloaded by users in the last 30 days alone, with its list of most popular titles topped by Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and the Kama Sutra. The top five authors of the last thirty days are: Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens (who just celebrated his 200th birthday,) Mark Twain, William Shakespeare, and Jane Austen.
Read more: http://ideas.time.com/2012/02/09/can-the-kindle-save-anna-karenina/?iid=op-main-lede#ixzz1lyYd5mJV
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