With 21 days left in the campaign, King Post has raised more than $65,500 on Kickstarter for “Moby Dick, or, The Card Game.”

Each card will showcase a quote from Herman Melville‘s beloved novel. The finished product will feature a deck that consists of more than 100 unique cards, 40 custom oil makers, 2 dice, and a rule book. We’ve embedded a video about the project above–what do you think? Here’s more about the project:

Just as one of Melville’s goals in writing the book was to bring landlubbers like us into the glorious and tragic world of the whaler at sea, our game encourages players to interact with the text in a new, exciting and immersive way. Even without a knowledge of the novel, playing the game will clue you into the relationships between key sailors and the various perils and processes of hunting whales in the 19th century.

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Novelist Teju Cole published “Seven short stories about drones” on Twitter, mixing in violent unmanned aerial vehicle imagery with classic first lines from literature.

Web artist Josh Begley collected the short stories in a Storify post (embedded below).

The short short stories referenced seven famous novels. We’ve linked to free copies of the books, when available. The are, in order: Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, Moby Dick by Herman Melville, Ulysses by James Joyce, Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, The Trial by Franz Kafka, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and The Stranger by Albert Camus.

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Readers around the globe have unwrapped new tablets and eReaders this holiday season. Below, we’ve included a long, long, long list of free and legal eBooks you can download right now for any device.

Explore our Project Gutenberg lists and click “read this eBook online” to sample the book without downloading anything.

If you have an iPad, iPad Mini, iPhone or iPod Touch, you can download the ePub edition. If you have a Kindle or a Kindle Fire, you need to download the Kindle edition. If you have a Nook, Sony eReader or a Kobo, you should download the ePub edition.

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President Barack Obama has won the 2012 Presidential election. We’ve collected links to five free eBooks that inspired Obama during his road to the Presidency.

In a 2009 essay, New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani wr0te about the books that inspired the President. Here’s an excerpt:

Mr. Obama’s love of fiction and poetry — Shakespeare’s plays, Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” and Marilynne Robinson‘s “Gilead” are mentioned on his Facebook page, along with the Bible, Lincoln’s collected writings and Emerson’s “Self Reliance“ — has not only given him a heightened awareness of language. It has also imbued him with a tragic sense of history and a sense of the ambiguities of the human condition quite unlike the Manichean view of the world so often invoked by Mr. Bush.

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Google has created a Google Doodle (embedded in this post) to celebrate the 161st anniversary of Moby Dick, the great American novel by Herman Melville.

If you want to read the book right now, follow his link to download a free copy of Moby Dick, Or, The Whale. 

In addition, Project Gutenberg has a great collection of other free eBooks by Melville. We’ve linked to these individual titles below–you can download the correct format for Kindle, Nook, Kobo, iPad and many other devices. (Google link via Mark Athitakis)

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What’s your favorite kind of book? We’ve created a giant flowchart to help you browse the top 50 free eBooks at Project Gutenberg.

Click the image above to see a larger version of the book map. Your choices range from Charles Dickens to Jane Austen, from Sherlock Holmes to needlework. Below, we’ve linked to all 50 free eBooks so you can start downloading right now. The books are available in all major eBook formats.

Follow this link to see an online version of the flowchart, complete with links to the the individual books.

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Yesterday, 27 readers and Occupy Wall Street supporters staged an outdoor reading of Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville at Zuccotti Park. Follow this link to download a free eBook copy of the novella.

The free event was organized by the Housing Works Bookstore Cafe events staff, McNally Jackson’s Sam MacLaughlin and The Gospel of Anarchy author Justin Taylor. According to Housing Works’ director of public programming Amanda Bullock, Bartleby‘s story resonates quite well with the mission of the OWS protest because it’s set on Wall Street, talks about passive resistance and “question[s] the assumed hierarchy.”

In an email, Taylor further explained why he chose Bartleby: “I want to evoke the long history of refusal that informs and enlivens OWS. Some in the movement may already have a vivid sense of that history, others may be getting involved in politics (or outing themselves as progressives) for the first time in their lives, but in any case I think it’s healthy to be reminded that the first step toward building a better world is asserting that the present state of affairs is intolerable and cannot be allowed to continue.”

Today Encore will launch a three-hour adaptation of Herman Melville‘s Moby Dick, airing in time for the author’s 192nd birthday. Follow this link to download a free eBook copy of the classic novel.

The production stars William Hurt as Captain Ahab, Gillian Anderson as his wife and Ethan Hawke as Starbuck. Mike Barker directed and Nigel Williams wrote the script.

Here’s more about the miniseries: Moby Dick is set in Nantucket, 1850. Captain Ahab, a veteran whale hunter who lost his leg to Moby Dick, wants revenge. Twisted by bitterness, he’ll put the entire crew of the Pequod in extreme danger to hunt down the great white whale. And he’ll stop at nothing to kill his nemesis.”

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The upcoming film, Age of the Dragons, will adapt Herman Melville‘s Moby Dick in a brand new setting–a medieval kingdom full of dragons.

In the video embedded above, watch Danny Glover play Captain Ahab, the disfigured dragon hunter. Thanks to io9 for turning us on to this crazy film.

Here’s more about the film: “Set in a medieval realm where Captain Ahab and crew hunt dragons for the vitriol that powers their world, Ishmael, a charismatic harpooner joins their quest. Ahab’s adopted daughter Rachel, beautiful and tough, runs the hunting vessel. Ahab’s obsession is to seek revenge on a great ‘White Dragon’ that slaughtered his family when he was young and left his body scarred and mauled, drives the crew deeper into the heart of darkness. In the White Dragon’s lair Ahab’s secrets are revealed and Rachel must choose between following him on his dark quest or escaping to a new life with Ishmael.”

Since August, artist Matt Kish has worked his way page-by-page through Herman Melville‘s Moby Dick–illustrating each page along the way.

Page 109 is pictured above, a painting entitled: “I will have no man in my boat,” said Starbuck, “who is not afraid of a whale.” Inspired by artist Zak Smith‘s project to create one illustration for every page of Thomas Pynchon‘s epic Gravity’s Rainbow, he tackled the mother of all modern novels. Fiction Circus passed a long the link to this obsessive project.

Here’s more from the site: “I would do one piece a day, every day, until I was done. And I have a full time job too. And a wife. And a life. For me, that kind of pace was almost inconceivable. I decided to just do whatever I wanted with the art, even if it looked crude or raw. After all, I had no one to please or disappoint but myself. Impulsively, I grabbed the first paperback edition of Moby-Dick I could find, which turned out to be the Signet Classic edition from 1992 with 552 pages. Looking back, maybe I should have thought things through a bit more since I’ve seen quite a few editions with around 400 pages, which would have saved me an awful lot of time.”