Here’s the backstory: My parents got a Kindle for Christmas, and I’ve looked into ways for them to read public domain books on it, and the interfaces for browsing for books and transferring them are non-optimal. First, I tried emailing books to the Kindle, which worked for me, but it was too complicated for my parents.

Then I found the Magic Catalog, an ebook index of Project Gutenberg books, linked up so that you can immediately download books and add them to your Kindle, without using a computer or Amazon. It’s in a useless order, though – it’s not sorted by the book title, or by author.

So I thought I’d fix that. Here’s the prototype, sorted by the author’s last name!

This is my first ebook, so please forgive the rough edges.

Update, 2013-02-20: I made major revisions, to the formatting and to the data. The authors’ names were mangled in spots.

Update, 2013-03-07:

• New list: Popular ebook downloads from the past month.
• Titles are sorted properly, ignoring stop words like a, an, and the.
• I removed most long subtitles. This removed about a third of the pagecount.
• There’s cover art again.
• Renamed the local file, removing a problematic apostrophe.

Update, 2013-03-13:

• adding navigation help – by the first two letters of authors’ last names, and for unspecified authors, the first letter of the book title
• added the latest books from Project Gutenberg
• I made an EPUB version, for readers without Kindles
• some fixes – some special characters, and some missing “illustrated version” labels

Update, 2013-03-18 – Fixed the EPUB version.