Summertime is a great time to catch up on some reading. While this article is a little departure from the standard open source fare, in the spirit of free (as in "freedom") software I thought I would you point you to some great summer reading in the public domain.

Project Gutenberg is a rather ambitious project aimed at getting every possible work of literature into freely available ebooks. The selection is fantastic, and there are several formats for downloadable documents, including plain and rich text formats.

Like many open source projects, Gutenberg actively seeks assistance in the form of donations and volunteers. While the texts are typically scanned rather than transcribed by hand, limitations in Optical Character Recognition software and hardware still require that the books be proofread, and volunteer readers are a big help here.

Another cool project on the web is Librivox. If you like to listen to books as you drive, walk, or participate in some non-geeky ambulatory exercise, you can download works in MP3 format for burning to CD, playback on your iPod-like device, or even recording to old-school magnetic tape.

If you have a bit of dramatic flair, you can help the project by recording books and chapters for Librivox. Just load up your favorite recording software and save the finished project as an MP3 file (see the Librivox site for instructions and specific encoding requirements.)

Here are a few books I recommend that you check out this summer if you've not already read them:

• The White Company — Arthur Conan Doyle
• Frankenstein — Mary Shelley
• King Solomon's Mines — Henry Rider
• A Smaller History of Greece — William Smith
• Robinson Crusoe — Daniel Defoe
• The Last of the Mohicans — James F. Cooper