Read Sherlock!
My pet project over Christmas break? To compile a website with all of the original Sherlock Holmes novels. Because Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died in 1930, and copyright law in the US only extends 75 years after the life of the original author, anyone can legally publish these stories on the internet! In fact, several websites (such as Project Gutenberg and Wikisource) have exactly these stories. But they have horrible formatting which makes reading the story on the computer or mobile phone really annoying. The best formatted and most comprehensive site by far is the University of Adelaide's. However, my site offers a few improvements over theirs:
1) Full texts without artificial page breaks. Perfect for printing or reading over a slow or inconsistent (cell phone) connection.
2) Better organization.
3) Permalinks for every paragraph, so you never lose your place.
4) A floating table of contents, so you can easily jump to another chapter in the same book.
I don't expect to make money off of public domain text (it's available freely a lot of places). But I hope to at least cover server costs by having Google Ads at the bottom of each page and having a list of recommended books through Amazon, which generous readers may buy.
The website? Readsherlock.com.
Help me out by linking to it!
If you like the design of the site but would rather read some other public domain authors such as Jane Austen or Mark Twain, just let me know. It'd help if you bought a book from the affiliate store. If you want a Charles Dickens website, let me know and buy a lot of books through the affiliate store.