Yesterday’s Classics

Books.

I love them. Some might say too much. But among homeschoolers, I’m pretty normal. Actually our home library is a bit smaller than many others I’ve heard about.

I love to read. I want my kids to love to read, and I don’t want a lack of good books available to be used as an excuse to not read. So I collect books, I go to used book sales, I check out tons of library books, and I ask for and give books for gifts.

But I’m running into a couple of problems. One is I’m running out of space. I have bookcases in almost every room of the house. Our house isn’t huge to start with, when you add in 7 people and their stuff, well, things get tight. The other problem is money. I think just about every family is facing at least a little bit of tightening in their budgets. And once again, with 7 people and an income that gets effectively smaller all the time, the book budget has to shrink.

I got an iPod Touch last Mother’s Day and my husband got one for Christmas. We discovered that we liked them. A lot. And we discovered that we could actually read on them! In the past, I had sort of turned my nose up at e-books. But my opinion has gradually shifted. I’ve even been considering buying a Kindle, parting with some of my physical books, and replacing them in e-format only!

That’s where things stood when I got the opportunity to review a HUGE collection of e-books from Yesterday’s Classics. By HUGE, I mean enormous. Seriously, this is their complete collection of 225 classic children’s books. These books were published between 1880 and 1920, so many have been out of print for decades. I was already familiar with Yesterday’s Classics, because Tapestry of Grace uses many of their books. Our Island Story and This Country of Ours are just 2 of the ones we’ve been reading this year.

Yesterday’s Classics has done an excellent job of categorizing the books in genres. The collection includes 22 different genres such as world history, poetry, science, nature, and biography. The e-books include the illustrations and are well-formatted with clean, properly-aligned pages, and a table of contents that are linked to the chapters. That is an extremely helpful feature in an e-book!

The books are available in both Kindle and EPUB formats. The download instructions provided by Yesterday’s Classics were both clear and thorough. I was able to download all the books in the EPUB format. I then copied the files into my book folder in iTunes. After syncing my iPod Touch with my computer, all the books are available in the iBooks app. I also downloaded the files in the Kindle format in the hope that I will be purchasing a Kindle soon. I can read them on the Kindle reader on my laptop while I’m waiting too. There are no restrictions on the files, so you can put them on all your e-reading devices. And if you have different types of e-readers, they will even send you the second file type for free after you order!

From now until May 31, 2011, this entire package is available from Yesterday’s Classics for only $99.95. This is an excellent deal! The paperback versions of all these books would cost $2495.75! And the e-books purchased individually are $648.80. Please visit the special offer page to see the list and description of every book in this collection. There is also a free sample book you can download. I am thrilled to have these books and highly recommend them if you have an e-reader or other device to read them. I’m not sure I would recommend them to read on the computer alone, unless you already know that you like to read from the computer monitor or laptop screen.

You can visit the Homeschool Crew blog to find links to other reviews of this collection.

Disclosure: I received these book from Yesterday’s Classics free to review as a member of the Homeschool Crew. All opinions expressed are my own.