If Ralphie was a kid today, you know he wouldn’t want a Red Ryder BB gun. Even if he did, his parents wouldn’t be caught dead buying one for him… They may be the only parents still buying Ovaltine, but they wouldn’t be totally out of touch.
Nope, you can bet this little window-faced Orphan Annie lover would be after an iPad… Or at least some variation of it. He probably would have got it too; imagine the windfall the family would have received from Apple if he poked his eye out with it! Assuming Ralph got what he wanted, and you did too, Dan Colman from Open Culture has some awesome places to get started with some free content. Take a gander:
Free eBooks: You have always wanted to read the great works. And now is your chance. When you dive into our Free eBooks collection you will find 375 great works by some classic writers (Dickens, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare and Tolstoy) and contemporary writers (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, and Kurt Vonnegut). The collection also gives you access to the 51-volume Harvard Classics.
Free Audio Books: What better way to spend your free time than listening to some of the greatest books ever written? This page contains a vast number of free audio books, including works by Arthur Conan Doyle, James Joyce, Jane Austen, Edgar Allan Poe, George Orwell and more recent writers — Italo Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov, Raymond Carver, etc. You can download these classic books straight to your gagdets, then listen as you go.
Free Online Courses: This list brings together over 600 free online courses from leading universities, including Stanford, Yale, MIT, UC Berkeley, Oxford and beyond. These full-fledged courses range across all disciplines – history, physics, philosophy, psychology and beyond. Most all of these courses are available in audio, and roughly 75% are available in video. You can’t receive credits or certificates for these courses (click here for courses that do offer certificates. But the amount of personal enrichment you will derive is immeasurable.
Free Movies: With a click of a mouse, or a tap of your touch screen, you will have access to 500 great movies. The collection hosts many classics, westerns, indies, documentaries, silent films and film noir favorites. It features work by some of our great directors (Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Andrei Tarkovsky, Stanley Kubrick, Jean-Luc Godard and David Lynch) and performances by cinema legends: John Wayne, Jack Nicholson, Audrey Hepburn, Charlie Chaplin, and beyond. On this one page, you will find thousands of hours of cinema bliss.
Free Language Lessons: Perhaps learning a new language is high on your list of 2013 New Year’s resolutions. Well, here is a great way to do it. Take your pick of 40 languages, including Spanish, French, Italian, Mandarin, English, Russian, Dutch, even Finnish, Yiddish and Esperanto. These lessons are all free and ready to download.
Free Textbooks: And one last item for the lifelong learners among you. We have scoured the web and pulled together a list of 150 Free Textbooks. It’s a great resource particularly if you’re looking to learn math, computer science or physics on your own. There might be a diamond in the rough here for you.
