Charles Darwin’s  - On the Origin of Species

First published on 24 November 1859, is a seminal work of scientific literature, considered to be the foundation of  the biology of evolution. The full title was On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. For the 6th edition of 1872, the title was changed to The Origin of Species. The book introduced the theory that there is an evolution of populations over the course of generations through a process of natural selection. It presented a full body of evidence that the diversity of life was caused by common descent through a branching pattern of evolution. Darwin included evidence that he had gathered on the Beagle expedition in the 1830s and his later findings from research, letters, and experimentation. He wrote a book about that expedition called “The Voyage of the Beagle” (You can find both of these books on the FREE eBooks page)

 During the first 50 years of the 1800’s the English scientific establishment was closely connected to the Church of England, while science was part of natural theology. Ideas about the metamorphosis of species were controversial as they conflicted with the beliefs that species were unchanging parts of a designed hierarchy and that humans were unique, unrelated to animals. The political and theological implications were intensely debated, but transmutation was not accepted by the scientific mainstream.

 The book was written for non-specialist readers and attracted widespread interest upon its publication. As Darwin was an eminent scientist, his findings were taken seriously and the evidence he presented generated scientific, philosophical, and religious discussion. The debate over the book contributed to the campaign by T.H. Huxley and his fellow members of the X Club to secularize science by promoting scientific naturalism. Within two decades there was widespread scientific agreement that evolution, with a branching pattern of common descent, had occurred, but scientists were slow to give natural selection the significance that Darwin thought appropriate. During the “eclipse of Darwinism” from the 1880s to the 1930s, various other mechanisms of evolution were given more credit. With the development of the modern evolutionary synthesis in the 1930s and 1940s, Darwin’s concept of evolutionary adaptation through natural selection became central to modern evolutionary theory, now the unifying concept of the life sciences.

Herbert George Wells:
Born

He was an English author, best known for his work in the science fiction genre. He was also a prolific writer in many genres, including contemporary novels, history, politics and social commentary. H.G. Wells along with Jules Verne have been referred to as “The Father of Science Fiction”

English novelist, journalist, sociologist, and historian, whose science fiction stories have been filmed many times. H.G. Wells’s best known works are THE TIME MACHINE (1895), one of the first modern science fiction stories, THE INVISIBLE MAN (1897), and THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (1898).

Go to the FREE eBooks page to download his books:
1. The Time Machine
2. The First Men in the Moon
3. The War of the Worlds
4. The Invisible Man
5. The Island of Doctor Moreau

The Reader Touch Edition features a responsive, menu-driven six-inch touch screen panel that enables quick, intuitive navigation, page turning, highlighting and note taking with the swipe of a finger or by using the included stylus pen.

Users can take handwritten notes with the stylus pen or type with the virtual keyboard. All notes can be exported and printed out for easy reference. The Touch Edition also offers five adjustable font sizes, as well as expansion slots for both Memory Stick PRO Duo and SD card, making your portable library virtually limitless.

Sony Reader Touch Edition Digital Book – Black

  The idea behind the Kindle is portability. No longer do you have to take several books with you wherever you go. The Kindle can hold about 1,500 ebooks and it fits inside of cargo pants pockets.

  Some people do a lot of note-taking, highlighting and underlining but Kindle takes care of that. Kindle makes it easy to highlight and take notes with a built in keypad. You can store all your highlights and notes within the reader itself. It is very easy to access all your notes instead of having to search through a regular book for all your notes and highlights.

 My favorite feature is that there is a built in dictionary. Just highlight the word in question and press the dictionary button. I used to keep a dictionary around me when I read. No More !!

  The Kindle is created specifically not to cause eye strain when you’re reading. There are no glare issues and you can take it out on a sunny day and see the screen perfectly. The one drawback is that the screen is not backlit because it could drain the battery quickly. So if you want to read in the dark you have to turn on a light or get a light attachment.

   Sony makes a ebook reader too but Amazon has some good prices for ebooks, so if you are an Amazon customer it makes sense. The Kindle has 3G wireless with a built in browser. It takes about 60 seconds to get a new ebook from Amazon.

The Kindle supports the following file formats:

• PDF
• Mobi
• Epub