Free E-Books: Classics, Puritans, and Other Reformed Literature

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alexanderjames

Puritan Board Sophomore
I assume most e-readerers are already well accustomed to all the free material that is available for their e-readers.
As a newcomer myself, I am astonished at the quality that one can get for free in e-book format.

Therefore, for any newcomers to this format I would like to recommend the following:

Firstly, with regards to the classics (mainly of western society), I have found that one can download the Harvard Classics collection free in many places as individual items, or as one item in the Kindle store (Kindle only of course); and for fiction (and non-fiction) classics I found the website 'feedbooks' public domain section excellent for EPUB downloads (with nice cover art). (One may consult compiled lists of 'greatest novels' or 'Great Books of the Western World' online for ideas.) This particular 'feedbooks' website even had Puritan works like Thomas Watson's 'Beatitudes'. Please beware that many of these websites may include immoral books including ungodly cover images as with many secular websites. Other websites like Project Gutenberg can be useful if you know what you are looking for (for example, Aquinas' Summa Theologica).

Secondly, with regards to Christian reformed literature, there is the Monergism website, Chapel Library, CCEL and other Christian websites you may find good material at. For specifically Puritan literature, you should take a look at what has been made available by members of the Board in recent months, at the PuritanInn.com , where you can download EPUB editions of a huge number of Puritan and other non-conformist authors in their complete works. This is an astounding achievement in my estimation.

Use Calibre software (or other) on your PC to transfer these files to your device. For Kindle they will be converted, I recommend the AZW3 format.
(You can also download PDFs and either read them directly as PDFs or convert them into a more friendly format. However, this will require more formatting in software like Calibre, and you may encounter difficulties depending on how good the PDF is.)


If you have any further suggestions for good free e-book material, please do share. Tolle lege, as they say!
 
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For future reference as well, since Logan cleared up a common misconception with how Kindle processes and "accepts" EPUB, in the future restructuring of The Puritan Inn; we will also be offering a AZW3 option for the Ebooks; which should make auto-loading easier. I didnt know the EPUBS still had to be converted for Kindle, or I would have done so in the beginning. But once I go to upload the entire corrected TCP Puritan & Non-Conformist Corpus in alphabetical and bundled form (225 or so large volumes instead of almost 6,000 separate works/ones) we will straighten this out at least on that site. Please be patient with me; I am going to try to bust out this Index first, create the PDFS and EPUBS, AZW3's, and upload them to the website; in that order. So 2023 will be a busy year for me Lord Willing. But since the Google site is only $13 per year; if I pay $13 a month for a year instead of each year; I should be able to rack up 100 years online in no time.

To take advantage of what we have now; the site is https://www.puritaninn.com/
I will post on here when the new version of the collection has been uploaded, and the site totally complete.
 
Do you guys have to change any special settings in calibre when converting books from CCEL? For some reason, every time I try to convert books from CCEL, it always comes out with these really annoying spaces between the text and I can't figure out how to get rid of them. Has anyone else had this problem?
 
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Do you guys have to change any special settings in calibre when converting books from CEEL? For some reason, every time I try to convert books from CCEL, it always comes out with these really annoying spaces between the text and I can't figure out how to get rid of them. Has anyone else had this problem?

I can show you how to fix that. Can you post the file you're trying to convert?
 
I can show you how to fix that. Can you post the file you're trying to convert?
Sorry I just realized I typed it wrong. I meant CCEL. For some reason it does it with all of their files. I just tried it again with this one and it did the same thing.
 
Ah, you're trying to convert a PDF. Well here's one thing you can do. In the Convert dialogue, choose "Look and Feel" and then choose the "Layout" tab. Check the box to remove spacing between paragraphs and then select an indent size. I usually like 1.2em but the default is 1.5.

That will be the easiest place to start. If you want to get into more fine control then we can do that too, but since you're starting from a PDF the underlying code probably won't be the cleanest so not the easiest to work with.

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Ah, you're trying to convert a PDF. Well here's one thing you can do. In the Convert dialogue, choose "Look and Feel" and then choose the "Layout" tab. Check the box to remove spacing between paragraphs and then select an indent size. I usually like 1.2em but the default is 1.5.

That will be the easiest place to start. If you want to get into more fine control then we can do that too, but since you're starting from a PDF the underlying code probably won't be the cleanest so not the easiest to work with.

View attachment 9987
Thanks! That seems to have worked for the most part. I convert PDFs all the time with Calibre and normally never have to change any setting. I'm not sure what they do to their files that makes them that way. Even their stuff on amazon than you can buy (even though its the same titles on their website that you can download for free) has the same problems and you can see people complaining about it on there.
 
Another website like Digital Puritan (mainly links to the Monergism site) - Puritanlibrary.com
More Christian material (however, many are only in PDF) - grace-ebooks.com
 
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If you can do PDFs (or by converting), you can get many of Vern Poythress' books free of charge here -
(Scroll down the page and click on the book covers for the PDFs.)
 
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