Just collecting the books

Last summer I looked for copies of the books on the list of Great Books Ben could choose from in the Well Trained Mind. I downloaded all the free ones from Google Books and Project Gutenberg.

Today I asked Ben to read all the synopses for the first fourth of the list to pare it down to the 3 or 4 he wants to read.  Of course, the interesting ones were the ones I had to pay a few bucks for.  The nice thing was that all the first quarter books are now available.

The not so nice thing is that to download them onto Ben’s Nook, I have to work through Adobe Digital Editions which we are trying to get to work on our Linux computer under WINE.

I hope the digital rights works for Google, but I’d really like it to work for both of us.  I’m not trying to steal, I just have a cutting edge operating system on a really old computer.  I wonder what percent of people have a Linux computer and it it’s really a negligible population?

Say, I have a Linux computer, I homeschool my kids and I have celiac disease – does that mean I’m in the 1%?