Catholic Classics as Free E-Books

If you have a Kindle (oooh, how I love my Kindle!), or if you don't (if you are reading this, you have access to a computer, right?)...there are good old Catholic books you can get for FREE. You can get them in various formats or just read them on your computer. Well, maybe not on the public library computer, as you have to download them. But do you have a family member or friend who would let you use their computer to download it and then put it on your thumb-drive? It seems to me you could read it from your thumb drive whenever you can get on a computer. I haven't tried that but I'm just trying to think creatively for those of you who may not have an e-Reader or a computer of your own at the moment.

This is not an all-inclusive list. These are just things that I have read and enjoyed...and now am happy to have in my Kindle library. You can do more searches of your own. Most of these titles are available from the Gutenberg Project, but you can get some free or inexpensive Catholic Kindle books from Amazon, and you can sometimes find Catholic e-books from other sources, as well. If you are willing to pay, you can get more current books, too.

Douay Rheims Catholic Bible comes as a free download from Gutenberg. Why the Douay Rheims? Some prefer it, but it's the only one I'm including because it's the only Catholic Bible I know of, that's available in e-format. I'm hoping the Catholic RSV will also appear at some point. I got my Douay Rheims Bible in Kindle format through Amazon for $3.99, because it is in a more navigable form, meaning I can find a particular book and chapter when I want to.

And that, my friends, is the drawback to getting e-books from Gutenberg, that you cannot always navigate easily from chapter to chapter; you have to read through from beginning to end or do a lot of scrolling around. That's why I jump at opportunities to get books from Amazon and even spend a few dollars, although - even from there - not all books are navigable. It pays to read the reviews.

The Story of a Soul, the Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux is also available as a free download from Gutenberg Press. What a beautiful, spiritual book this is, and it's one you can enjoy reading from beginning to end, which means not worrying about navigation. And as most Kindle users know, if you have a Kindle it will save your place in one book, even if you go read another Kindle book, say you want to read another genre, and then come back to it later.

Would you like to hear how a cardinal at the turn of the century - no, the other century, late 1800's to early 1900's - explained the Catholic Faith, especially for non-Catholics and converts? James Cardinal Gibbon's The Faith of Our Fathers is an interesting and inspiring explanation of our beautiful Faith. Some things are not up to date with current rules and regulations, but the basic truths, of course, are universal for all times and places.

You can get Lourdes, and other books by Msgr. Robert Hugh Benson from Gutenberg, also.

Would you like to know what a famous Protestant author thought about St. Damien? You can download Father Damien, an Open Letter, by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Wait! Once you have downloaded these books onto your computer, how do you get them onto your Kindle? If you're not already familiar with this procedure, you can go to the Amazon page: Transferring, Downloading and Sending Files to Kindle 2nd Generation. Scroll down to "Connecting your Kindle device to your computer" and "Transferring Kindle content". Or did a manual come with your computer? Hopefully you will be able to figure out it, because I am not a computer geek. But if you have any problem, as my geeky son always tells me when I am not sure what to do, "Google it". (Just be sure you visit safe sites.) I have found it really quite easy to put downloaded books onto my Kindle once I got the hang of it, so I wish you the best of luck, too.

Enjoy your reading, and God bless you.