I find it useful to read books online since I can manage the font size, usually search the books, and so many good books are available free. I own a Kindle, the Amazon portable digital book reader for which one can purchase a fairly large number of recent books. On the other hand there are several sites that provide books you can read on your laptop, free, with millions of choices. Here is a sample:
Google Book Search: This works like the Google web search engine, except it searches books. It returns book content matching your search term. However, it allows the reader to preview many books under copyright online, to see Full Views of many books, and for books that are out of copyright, to download the entire book in PDF format.
The Universal Digital Library: Sometimes called the Million Book Library, with a number of mirror sites. has exceeded its original objective of a million books digitized and searchable.
The Open Library: This is a project of the Internet Archive, with more than 20 million book records online, of which more than one million are available in full text. The books available to be read online are in a format allowing you to page through with a "virtual book".
The Internet Archive itself has more than one million texts online, but it also provides moving images, music and audio files free, online. The Open Content Alliance, which supports the Internet Archive, makes a Book Reader available.
Project Gutenberg: This is one of the grandfathers of the digital book program, with 28,000 online books, all in public domain, and more than 100,000 titles available through affiliates, partners, etc.
The Perseus Digital Library: Covers the history, literature and culture of the Greco-Roman world and is expanding to other works from the Classics to other subjects within the humanities and beyond.
Page by Page Books: Hundreds of classics from the English language that can be read free online.
The National Academies Press: This is a specialized source with the full production of books and reports from the U.S. National Academies of Science (Medicine and Engineering). The materials can be read online in a special format for folk from developed nations, but can be downloaded free by those in developing nations.
Coming in the future is the World Digital Library, by a coalition under the auspices of UNESCO, headed by the Library of Congress.
Monday, April 06, 2009
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More Than 9,000 National Academies Reports Now Available in Open Access
The National Academies announced the completion of the first phase of a partnership with Google to digitize the library's collection of reports from 1863 to 1997, making them available – free, searchable, and in full text – through Google Book Search. The Academies hope that wider availability of its reports will be of use to scientists in developing countries as well as researchers and historians.
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