App Advice is reporting that they have noticed a large number of free books are available in the iBookstore from Project Gutenberg.

If you’re not familiar with the Gutenberg Project, it’s a free online digital library supported by volunteers. This library already includes over 30,000 free eBooks from the public domain; it is an amazing popular resource.

Well, when checking out Apple’s iBookstore, I noticed that Apple has decided to include these directly. I obviously haven’t had the chance to count them, but it appears that the entire catalog is available for free download.

This news shouldn’t come as a total surprise. Apple posted an iBooks feature page earlier this month which confirmed that the iBooks application does in face support the open ePub standard. This same standard is used by Project Gutenberg and other similar open libraries. That means the Project Gutenburg titles are compatible with iPad from the start.

Worth mentioning again, just the other day App Advice noted that most of New York Times’ best sellers on the iBookstore appear to compete with Amazon’s $9.99 price point.

Image courtesy of App Advice.

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