Bookworm

Books have to be read. It is the only way of discovering what they contain. A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the West. - E. M. Forster

Once upon a time, a knight of yonder wanted to gain all the knowledge there was to find in the world. Inquisitive, they called him. All his time would rather be spent reading a novel by any artist of yore. No wonder, his comrade thought he was a bore.

One fine night, he started on his search for online books. Knight worked at Night, because his dial-up connection did not allow him the luxury of bandwidth during peak hours. So, there he was, on his quest to find Philip K. Dick's epochal science fiction novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Surprisingly, only one site led to his ultimate destination:
truly-free.org

The site was unlike any he had seen before. It was more of a library. Owned by the inscrutable Burgomeister, the site offered books far distant from the mainstream. There was Chinua Achebe, Isaac Asimov, Saul Bellow, Daphne du Maurier; even Dashiel Hammett. Somehow, the library was more of a cornucopia of books by award winning authors. Be it Nobel Prize, Pulitzer or even Booker, one was sure to find e-books of literature. That's how our knight in shining armour found Kiran Desai's Inheritance of Loss.

People may call it piracy, but it isn't. For one, the ebooks are ebooks; they can't be regarded as hardback or paperback commercial items. Also, there is a disclaimer on the site that as in the case of any library, the novels downloaded by any reader have to be deleted after five days, as a method of returning them to the library. Thirdly, no money exchanged hands. However, there is a special section for people who want to donate through PayPal. (Audioslave released their album for free on their site, yet there were millions who downloaded it through torrents. With such a large number of cheapstakes around, I wonder if anyone actually donates anything to truly-free.org).

Anyways, coming back to the point, if you are not averse to reading books on your computer or mobile device, here is a special site that can satisfy all your literary whims and fancies. A word of caution though, do not expect to find mainstream authors like Dan Brown here. But you can find Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood, John Le Carre, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and ehm...our very own...V.S. Naipaul (Some people adore his writing, my opinion is quite the opposite).

Happy reading.

With the happy thought that he might have helped other voracious readers in CyberSpace, our knight rides off into the sunset.

Books give not wisdom where was none before, But where some is, there reading makes it more. - Sir John Harington