What Sweeter Music

Catholic Books – The Treasure Trove

Since I have written about how cheap it is to build a Catholic library on Amazon, I have received comments with a couple of interesting points:

1. If you cancel your Amazon account, this is all gone (it seems obvious to me, but it bears repeating). The one who wants to stop giving business to Amazon should, in my eyes, not cancel the account. Similarly, pay attention before cancelling your email address: you’ll never remember how many things you can only access through it.
2. There are alternative ways to get an impressive number of Catholic books on the cheap, or for free. Most impressive was the comment sent to me by reader Grassrootgonzo, with a link to the Traditional Catholic website.

If you follow the link, you will find, at the top of the page, two English Books tabs. They have what seem to me (have not counted) hundreds of free Traditional Catholic books. Many of these books are available in different formats. Another tab looks like a very extensive collection of Lives of the Saints.

A quality .pdf portable reader should make it possible to read these books on the go, with or without signal, and to read them for hours without it being fatiguing to the eyes (I rely on Kindle for this).

My suggestion for those who choose this way is to visit the site and upload a vast quantity of those books, both on their hard drive and in the cloud space. This will avoid that the sudden death of the hard drive (an always possible event, unless you have a very expensive solid state drive; I think it might happen with that, either!) means the loss of information that took hours to gather and might take a long time to gather again if sites like the one above are shut down.

Still, it seems to me that the point I was making in the original post still stands and is even reinforced: the amount of sound, traditional Catholic material available for free, or almost for free, is staggering.

Happy reading!