Yesterday, AppAdvice.com reported that the iBooks App for Apple’s new iPad will feature the entire Gutenberg Project catalog free of charge. An incredible digital resource, the Gutenberg Project is maintained with the help of thousands of volunteers, and offers more than 30,000 digitized books for free. The books are available in a variety of digital formats (ePub, HTML, etc.) and can be viewed on PCs, smart phones, eReaders, and soon the iPad. All of their titles are in the public domain, and AppleInsider.com speculates that Apple pursued this partnership in order to head off the propagation of inferior apps created to make a profit on books already free to the public. We’re big supporters of reading for free at In the Stax, and applaud Apple for providing these valuable resources to their consumers at no charge.

The iBooks App will not come pre-installed on the iPad, but can be downloaded from the App Store for free. Amazon and Barnes & Noble also announced this month that they are developing iPad apps for their respective eReaders Kindle and Nook, so iPad users will have some choice in this arena. An Amazon Kindle iPhone app is already available on the App Store. Apple hasn’t announced plans to port the iBooks App to the iPhone or iPod Touch yet, but a scaled down version is expected to be released in the future for these devices as well.