Awesome Books (in Markdown)

[bowerbird]

gerard said:
>   Might be great to get some classics 
>   (in the public domain) 
>   e.g. Shakespeare, Dickens and friends.

your other page, gerard, gave a nod to
other forms of light-markup, including
restructured-text, asciidoc, textile, etc.

so i'm unclear if this page now means
"markdown" in the john-gruber sense,
or a more-generic "light-markup" way.

because project gutenberg was using
light-markup -- i.e., a structured form
of plain-text -- since its start in 1976...

the "structure" was often a bit wobbly,
as you would expect, given progress -- 
the earliest e-texts had no lower-case,
originating on key-punch machines --
and it was only lightly "enforced" upon
volunteers who comprise the project,
and it was terribly inconsistent as well;
_but_ it was solid enough, advanced
enough, and consistent enough, that
i used it as the foundation for my z.m.l.,
a light-markup that _targets_ long-form.

so, you know... if you want examples,
project gutenberg has 40,000-50,000.

-bowerbird

p.s. leanpub.com has a bunch as well.
and the guys over there are, right now,
developing "markua", their own flavor of
markdown/light-markup for long-form...

p.p.s. columbus didn't discover america.

p.p.p.s. https://github.com/rhythmus/markdown-resources