I read Charles T. Currelly’s autobiography, I Brought The Ages Home, a number of years ago. I found it to be such an interesting book - he was a real life Canadian Indiana Jones, leading archaeological digs and acquiring artifacts. He describes the late 1800s/early 1900s in Canada as a time full of promise and opportunity.

Charles T. Currelly (January 11, 1876 – April 10, 1957) was the first director of the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) from 1914 to 1946, and acquired much its initial collection. As he passed away over 50 years ago, his autobiography fell into the public domain (note: on December 30, 2022, the general term of copyright protection in Canada changed from 50 to 70 years after the death of the author, but this did not affect works that were already in the public domain). I created an ebook version, as it’s an interesting public domain work that I haven’t seen shared elsewhere and we all benefit from a work with some historical importance being freely available (see /create-epub-from-paperback/ for how it was created). A scanned copy of the book is available from archive.org.

Since reading about James Bond creator Ian Fleming’s work entering the public domain in Canada in 2015, I’ve thought about creating public domain ebooks that I could share online. At the time, I picked up a copy of Octopussy, and scanned it. I ran it through the OCR software bundled with the scanner I was using, and the results were pretty mediocre. At that time, the OCR process was certainly faster than typing, but the output required a lot of manual review - I abandonned the project. In short order, the Canadian Gutenberg team created excellent James Bond ePubs, and I note now that other ones are available from Faded Page.

I was looking for something to read in June, and decided to read Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence, the author’s account of his leading the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire in World War I. The book was made into a movie, Lawrence of Arabia. As the author died in 1935, the book is long out of copyright, and I downloaded a free copy from Standard Ebooks.

I don’t have a lot of space for books, which is one of the reasons I’m a frequent patron of my local library. I borrow both traditional books and ebooks, which I can read on my Kobo reader. If I was going to buy a book, my preference is for an ebook over a paper copy, as I don’t want the physical good. A number of years ago, I wanted to read The Road Chose Me, by Dan Grec - it wasn’t available from my library AND I’m pretty sure it wasn’t available on Kobo at the time (it is now!).