Project Gutenberg e-books on Kindle?

My mother received a Kindle for Mother's Day and I was telling her about the number of older books available from Project Gutenberg.

However, since the Kindle seems to use a specialized format, I was unsure about how easy it would be for her to read these books on her Kindle.

Has anyone done this? It would be great if anyone knows of a tutorial I could point my mother to.

Thanks.

Gutenberg books are mostly in .txt format, but some are also available in html.

.txt format can be read directly by the Kindle with no conversion necessary. The only downside is that Gutenberg .txt files have hard returns,
so you might
get weird line breaks, like this. I use MobiPocket Creator to clean this up.

I tend to prefer .html if it's available. If the book has pictures, the html file will have them, where .txt won't. An html file will need to be converted. I use Creator, but you can use the Amazon email conversion service if you don't want to convert it yourself.

If you don't want to deal with conversion hassles, you can get free ebooks from feedbooks.com or manybooks.net. Most of these originate with Gutenberg, but come already converted to a Kindle compatible format. Another good source is mobileread.com, free and no conversion necessary.

With all the free books out there, you could read for the rest of your life and never spend another penny on books if you don't want to.

Garrybuck, you are SO helpful. I love the new Kin. You must be a speed reader to cover so much material.

Glad to be of help. I haven't done any speed-reading since college. I just have a lot of free time on my hands 'cuz I'm retired. I really love my Kindle, I haven't read this much in my life.

You can also go to
www.feedbooks.com
and download their catalog directly to your kindle.....books need no reformatting, and they load automatically by author. You can download books from your kindle, or from your laptop. There aren't any extraneous pages before the story like with the gutenberg site.

I also discovered this from feedbooks (mobipocket also has the same thing). It is great! I can do it directly from the kindle! I strongly recommend people do this as you never have to use your computer!!!

I have both the Mobipocket Guide from MobileRead and the Kindle Download Guide from Feedbooks. I prefer the Kindle Download Guide because I think the indexing is much better.

Also, I discovered a title on the Mobipocket Guide, Kindle Bookmarks, that was in zip format and therefor could not be downloaded directly to the Kindle. Why couldn't the woman who wrote it format it for the Kindle since it is about the Kindle?

I couldn't find anything on mnybks.com like a guide or, actually, anything else of use.

I was incorrect about mnybks. The correct url is mnybks.net/joomla. That url takes you to ebooks for the Kindle.