Splinters

Blimey. Michael Palin, ex-Monty Python globetrotter and all round Lovely Chap, has the complete text of all of his bestselling travel books online at www.palinstravels.co.uk. They come complete with photos and video clips too - someone's really thought about how to open up Palin's books and let a bigger audience come and riffle through the pages and see something of the TV series he made too. Impressive. A pity there's no PDFs to download the text for offline reading, but there we go. It's interesting that someone who's sold as many books as Palin is taking such an admirable "open source" approach to his work. The site reinvents the books as reference guides - you're probably not going to page through each chapter online, but the search functions can let you find the bits about specific destinations. Cracking stuff.

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