Hi Everyone

I am in Canada. I was looking in a database at books available to library users in Dublin, Ireland recently and I am quite jealous.

Here in Canada, I have four library cards and access to books from a population of roughly 5 million.

There is not a single book written in the Irish language available though this. Is there anywhere I might be able to download Irish books for free or at low cost?

My first few books will likely be trial and error and it could be expensive to buy them and ship them to Canada.

Thanks for reading-Patrick

I don't know exactly what you're looking for. Stories? Novels? Poetry?
Here are two sites that have downloadable texts, a lot of historical stuff.

https://www.nli.ie/

https://celt.ucc.ie/publishd.html

Search around and you may be able to find more.
Some other people here have good resources, too.

Cheers,

Tim

Thanks Tim

So far I haven't found quite the right bit of stuff to read in the links but I might be missing something.

Until 6 months ago, I had spent the last 25 years reading non-fiction only. I am trying to learn to love fiction again.

I have found Harry Potter books in Irish and Agatha Christie as well. I am probably looking for something along these lines. If I can't find anything, I guess I will buy one and try it.

Thanks again

Have you tried Amazon.com. They have some downloadable at a fairly reasonable price. I belong to a reading group urscealta.com and we are presently reading Buille Marfach which I downloaded. Do you read Tuairisc.ie. A nice feature of Tuairisc is that you can access Teanglann.ie or Focloir.ie quite easily while reading.

Hi Séamus

Thanks for all these tips. I haven't figured out how to access the dictionaries from within tuairisc yet but I will work on this tonight. In the meantime I will look at the reading group and the amazon books.

Thanks!

Got it! Wow

tuairisc.ie is a great site. On the top left is a toggle button labelled FOCLÓIRÍ. Once activated the words all become clickable links that will pop up a translation.

Very nice!

It's sad, Ireland has what 6M people. There are 100M people in the Philippines but the resources to learn Tagalog are so terrible. I would kill for something like this in Tagalog. I have been married to my wife for 16 years now and it's been a long-long road to learn Tagalog.

-Patrick

Patrick - I see that I gave the wrong address for the reading group. The correct one is ''urscealta@groups.io''. If you are interested you can Google Urscealta and it has the info on joining. Another worthwhile dictionary Is "Potafocal.com. It gives words and phrases in context. It was compiled by Michal Bolesav Mechura who has done yeomans work.
Jim

Hi Jim
no worries and thanks and thanks for the link to potafocal. This website can be used from a text only web browser and as such it can be integrated into simple programs on Linux. I used this:

elinks http://www.potafocal.com/gt/?s=an

and I got the output for the article "the". Now I can create a little translator for myself. very fun !

-Pat