stockyturtle’s posterous

Wait for your train in my car by the station/
On the wheel my hands are burning from the cold/
What do you dream as you doze against the window/
And will you tell the dream when you come home

I walked into a coffee shop this morning to get my liquid fix and to read a bit. After I grabbed my brew and squeezed into a pretentiously tiny table I realized I didn't have my book in my bag. So I sat staring into my oversized mug wondering how to extract myself from the situation. I considered just drinking the coffee and trying to tune out the hipsters sitting across from me discussing the ins and outs of some sort of nonsense, but I turned to my iPhone instead.

I don't know how many people realize this, but there are free books to be had in the App Store. Luckily I preloaded my selections ahead of time, so I opened right up to my bookmarked page in Jerome K. Jerome's Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow. I have a couple dozen others downloaded and waiting to be read, and they cost me nothing. Download these apps now to make sure your reading contingency plan is firmly in place:

1.) Stanza. This is my primary source for free books. It's a catalog and e-reader for several databases of books (such as Project Gutenberg and Fictionwise) that are part of the public domain. Browse the databases, pick the books you like, and download them to your Stanza "Library." Reading through them is easy due to the finger-swipe page-flip effect, and it automatically bookmarks your spot if you leave the application. You can also select text and save it to a notepad for later use. There are hundreds of thousands of books out there, but here are some gems:

- Dracula by Bram Stoker
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
- Moby Dick by Herman Melville
- The Notebooks of Leonardo DaVinci
- Walden by Henry David Thoroeau
- Grimm's Fairy Tales by Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
- A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
- The Marvelous Land Of Oz by L. Frank Baum

2.) Classics. This app is an abbreviated and dressed up version of Stanza, complete with a bookshelf interface, cover illustrations, and cleaner pages. The books are pre-selected, but here are some gems here too:

- 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea by Jules Verne
- The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
- A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
- Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
- Robinson Crusoe by Daniel DeFoe

3.) Shakespeare. This app gives you all of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets, and is searchable. Seriously.