Free Ebooks

Thanks for compiling such an easy to remember, easy to use list of these resources! I had *heard* and *read* about these sites, but never visited/practiced with them. So I'm glad for the chance. I visited Project Gutenberg first and successfully downloaded A Tale of Two Cities. I then went to Many Books, and I concur, this was my favorite. The layout was great, browsing or searching was easy. I went to subjects and found cookery. Funnily enough, I hadn't really ever thought before about cookbooks as ebooks. But what a fantastic idea. So I downloaded The Allison Vegetarian Cookbook, published in 1915. (I didn't know there WERE vegetarians in 1915.) I was very highly amused. The first introduction paragraph:

"This book is written with the object of laying before the public a cookery book which will be useful not only to vegetarians, but also to flesh eaters, who are often at a loss for recipes for non-flesh dishes. Nowadays, most people admit that "too much meat is eaten"; but when the housewife tries to put before her family or friends a meal in which meat is to be conspicuous by its absence, she is often at a loss how to set about it."

"Non-flesh dishes" I also like the insinuation that only "housewives" cook. I dig it. Maybe I will make some of his non-flesh suggestions. I was going to mock some of the recipe titles here, but they actually look really good!

Anyway. I knew Google Books had the ones you could read directly in your browser, but I hadn't ever downloaded them as epub, and it was good to know about that as a possibility. I successfully downloaded The Secret Garden.

A great task! Now if only I can successfully make a cheese souffle...

Optimal Resume

I was able to watch the demonstration of Optimal Resume from their rep with Nancy T and immediatley thought it would be a crazy beneficial tool for our patrons. It does an incredible assortment of tasks, seems pretty intuitive, and keeps things well organized. I'm demonstrating Optimal Resume for our Job Series classes currently. So far the reaction (the class of 4) has been mixed. The more comfortable folks are with basic computer skills, the more comfortable they'll be with this, but I suppose that goes for any computer application. At any rate, I had to get very cozy with Optimal Resume, and there's so much to explore. I like that help, examples, samples and tips are always very readily available, but you're also easily able to create everything yourself. It gives you any amount of guidance that you need. And once you use one function, all the rest are very similarly organized, so it makes it easy to learn. Hopefully people will get comfortable with this great tool!