Free books, anyone? Google Books has well over 40,000 titles online that are free to read online (and usually free to download in .pdf format, and some in .epub format), and more on the way. Return 10 results 20 results 30 results 50 results 100 results with all of the words with the exact phrase with at least one of the words without the words Search in: complete online books preview or full view all books library cat's Return pages written in any languageArabicArmenianBelarusianBulgarianCatalanChinese (Simplified)Chinese (Traditional)CroatianCzechDanishDutchEnglishEsperantoEstonianFilipinoFinnishFrenchGermanGreekHebrewHungarianIcelandicIndonesianItalianJapaneseKoreanLatvianLithuanianNorwegianPersianPolishPortugueseRomanianRussianSerbianSlovakSlovenianSpanishSwedishThaiTurkishUkrainianVietnamese Find books with the title e.g. Books and Culture written by e.g. Hamilton Mabie or "Hamilton Wright Mabie" published by e.g. O'Reilly on the subject e.g.Medieval History or "Medieval History" published between the years of e.g. 1970 and 1972  and  Return books with the ISBN e.g. 0060930314 The Open Library is a search interface from the Internet Archive which contains records for 13.4 million books (with more coming). You can search the full text of 230,000 scanned books. Those available online can be read in your browser in "flipbook viewer" format, or downloaded in .pdf or DjVu format. find this in the title :   in scanned books only advanced search You can find the full-text of over 25,000 free books online with the U. of Pennsylvania Digital Library's The On-Line Books Page search engine. Read the complete works of Shakespeare, find out what happened to Captain Ahab, and much more. title:   author: About 20,000 of the books indexed by the Online Books search engine are from Project Gutenberg. You might want to try the experimental full text feature of their advanced search form. You can also check for "new" books on their recent additions page. To help archive more books at Project Gutenberg, you can join Distributed Proofreaders. author:     word(s) in title: EText-No.:     The goal of Carnegie Mellon University's Universal Digital Library Million Book Collection is to be "a free-to-read, searchable collection of one million books, available to everyone over the Internet. Within 10 years, it is our expectation that the collection will grow to 10 Million books." To view UDL-MBC books, you need either the DjVu plugin and/or a Windows, Linux, or Macintosh TIFF plugin for your browser. find this: enter words in the book title advanced search - browse Wikisource is a free online library anyone can edit, with over 52,700 texts. enter title, author, or keywords: Although their user interface is not as friendly as those above, at the Digital Book Index you can browse or search through links to over 90,000 free books online.

See also: QuickShop: Bookstores - QuickShop: Magazines - QuickShop: Book Clubs • Amazon book downloader,     read Kindle, .pdf, play mp3 • 6" 600x800 touch FL B&W • $9.99/NYT bestseller • Wi-Fi, Browser • 7.5oz, 15hr batt • Amazon book downloader,     read Kindle, .pdf, play mp3 • 6" 600x800 touch FL B&W • $9.99/NYT bestseller • Free 3G + Wi-Fi, Browser • 7.8oz, 15hr batt • Tablet PC: read, browse web,   play video, mp3, run apps... • 8" 1024x600 touch BL color • Android 2.3 OS • Wi-Fi, runs free Kindle SW • 1.2lbs Nuance Free PDF Reader has features Adobe Reader lacks. Free ePub Format Reader Software: Adobe Digital Editions FB Reader   Current Book Reviews US Copyright Renewal Records     US books published prior to 1923 are now public domain. For US books published between 1923 and 1963, the rights holder needed to submit a renewal form to the US Copyright Office 28 years after publication. Most books that were not renewed are now in the public domain, and most books weren't renewed. So most US books published from 1923 to 1963 should be freely usable.     US Copyright Office records from 1978 onward are online but not downloadable in bulk. Carnegie Mellon scanned earlier records, and Project Gutenberg and Distributed Proofreaders corrected the OCR. Jarkko Hietaniemi gathered the records from both sources and combined them into a single XML file available for download from Google. "There are undoubtedly errors in these records, but we believe this is the best and most comprehensive set of renewal records available today."

The University of Virginia Electronic Text Center, now at a new URL, provides free online access to thousands of "humanities texts" (including fiction) in thirteen languages, including 9,575 titles in modern English. Now available for the Microsoft Reader and PalmOS handhelds are 2100 of their English books in downloadable .lit (MS Reader) and .pdb (Palm) formats, all free. These books can also be found using the Online Books search form above.

E-Bookseller NetLibrary has almost 3400 free books you can read online (with free registration). They also provide access to the ebooks kept by many local brick-and-mortar libraries.

NAP Reading Room has over 3000 full-text science books and papers, free to read online, from the National Academy Press of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Oxford University Press Reading Room free sample chapters and other extracts of many of their books in Adobe .pdf format.

4 Literature also provides numerous full text books online.

The British Library Online Gallery lets you view images of rare books.

Free Sheet Music: The Sheet Music Consortium, hosted by the UCLA Digital Library, provides free online and downloadable scans of old sheet music. For example, a search for "Stephen Foster" produces 333 results. browse find this: in digitized sheet music only     use % for wildcard: lov% to find love, loving, lovely   If you can't find it for free, try Music Notes, the world's largest sheet music store. They also have some free sheet music, as well as free blank staved paper layout you can download and print out.

More links: British Columbia Digital Library General Online Book Collections - Directories, Guides, Portals, Search

eBooks, particularly public domain eBooks that are simple .txt files, can be uncomfortable to read from a PC display. BookReader is a comfortable freeware e-book viewer that solves this problem. BookReader reformats text documents to represent them on your screen according to your preferences. It remembers the reading position for each book from your personal library. Text and the page layout are fully customizable: you can alter fonts, colors, page dimensions, borders, textures, etc.

The FictionMags Index lists the contents of popular fiction magazines. "Particular emphases are on the “Gaslight” magazines of circa 1880-1914, the pulp magazines of the first half of the 20th century, the “Big Slick” magazines of the mid-20th century, the digest-sized magazines of the 1950s and 1960s — and any other areas of magazine publishing which have been important for fiction."

18th Century Literature provides links to 18th century literature resources, including books.

Preserving Original Texts has photos of early through modern writing (on the original materials), part of a data recording exhibit: 'Keeping Our Word: Preserving Information Across the Ages.

Library Journal Digital "is an electronic offshoot of Library Journal, the oldest independent national library publication" founded in 1876. Of particular interest is the excellent 'WebWatch' section, which gives good descriptions of many good websites.

Poetry.com not only provides reading material, they also have a poetry writing contest with $58,000 in prizes.

Poems.com

CyberEdit Document Editing offers web page and business editing by Harvard-educated editors (resumes, term papers and admissions essays, too).

Screenwriting.info provides help for beginning screenwriters. Playwrights' help can be found at Playwriting 101.

iUniverse, as they put it, is 'The leading open publisher...opening publishing to everyone. We have made it easier than ever to bring your manuscript or out-of-print titles to print.' Upload your manuscript and they'll give you a website, an ISBN number, and a deal for 'instant publishing' hard copy sales through the major vendors.

The Postmodern Generator is a demonstration of software that writes essays by linking quotes and jargon.

Writer's Digest

from The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle     $4.95 at Amazon.com or read it online free     "Really Watson, you excel yourself," said Holmes, pushing back his chair and lighting a cigarette. "I am bound to say that in all the accounts you have been so good as to give of my own small achievements you have habitually underrated your own abilities. It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but you are a conductor of light. Some people without posessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it..."     "Has anything escaped me," I asked with some self-importance...     "I am afraid, my dear Watson, that most of your conclusions were erroneous. When I said you stimulated me I meant, to be frank, that in noting your fallacies I was occasionally guided towards the truth."

Abebooks   (Advanced Book Exchange) provides access to over 80 million used, rare, out-of-print and new books, from over 13,500 of used, secondhand, rare, out-of-print and new booksellers around the world. AbeBooks Textbooks AbeBooks Audio Books   author:    Attributes: First Edition Signed Dust Jacket title:  keyword:    Binding: Any Binding Hard Cover Soft Cover ISBN:    AbeBooks UK  •   AbeBooks Australia & New Zealand  •   AbeBooks Canada

  New Kindle (basic version, $79) user review:

Everything works great as advertised.

Pros:
- Amazingly thin and light.

- Battery seems to run forever. With the Wi-Fi turned off, expecting the listed 15 hours, I thought it would be about half drained after a few days and found that it was not yet a quarter down.

Cons:
- If you want to enter any text it is no fun at all. Very awkward and difficult. I presume the Touch model has a touch keyboard, and this would be much easier. At only $20 more, it makes far more sense to buy the Touch.

- They really should put some kind of light into these things. Built in edge light or backlight. Good accessory lights cost about $25, absurdly expensive.

- Most .pdfs are very difficult to read. They display too small, even rotated to landscape mode. If you zoom in, you must choose 150% or 200%, and you get just one side of the page, and it is very awkward to move from side to side. They need to change the zoom function to allow increments of 10%, 110%, 120%, etc., so you can get just the full text centered. You can improve things a bit by trimming the margins off the .pdf (if they are uniform) by using freeware PDFill Tools (http://download.cnet.com/PDFill-Free-PDF-Tools/3000-18497_4-10435051.html). Then the text will be displayed larger.

However, if you want to read a lot of .pdfs you should probably purchase a tablet PC such as the Coby 8" with Android 2.3 which is only $160 at Amazon (this, of course, also solves the backlight problem). The Kindle display is not large enough for many .pdfs.

If you want to view photos, it can be done, one at a time. Rather slow. If you want to view many in a row like a slide show, resize the photos to 600x800 (landscape) or 800x600 (portrait), then convert the photos to .pdf format, using a free tool such as CutePDF (http://www.cutepdf.com/products/cutepdf/writer.asp) and finally merge the separate .pdf pages into one file with another free tool such as PDFTK Builder (http://www.angusj.com/pdftkb/#pdftkbuilder). Set the contrast on your Kindle to maximum for best photo viewing.