The Web for Book Lovers

Your grandmother probably told you more than once that the best things in life are free. Maybe, like me, you feel like more and more of your favorite things comes with a price tag? Then you and your gandmother both will be glad to know that it is easy to find free quality books on-line.

Project Gutenberg

(April 30 2004) Project Gutenberg is the Internet's oldest producer of free electronic books. It was founded in 1971 by Michael Hart who was given an operator's account with $100,000,000 of computer time in it by the operators of the Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the Materials Research Lab at the University of Illinois.

Hart clamed that the greatest value created by computers would not be computing, but would be storage, retrieval, and searching. Was he right or was he right?

Project Gutenberg now has more than 10 000 books availiable – totally free, in Bulgarian, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Welsh, and Yiddish. All of the scanning, proof reading, and publishing is done by volunteers.

Read Print

Not as huge or as old as Project Gutenberg, Read Print still offers thousands of litterary works. The site is beautifully designed and the works are easy to find and a joy to read. You can browse by author and each author is presented with a short biography and a picture. There is also the oportunity to search within the works of each author.

A special section is dedicated to William Shakespeare. So if you are searching for that special love sonnet, it will be easy to find.

There is also a small collection of articles and essays on litterature. Read Print is a good place to go for any book lover, but it will be of special interest to teachers and students of English litterature.

The Online Books Page

For a list of 20 000 online books, go to the Online Books Page. It is not as user friendly as Read Print, but it contains links to an enormous amount of litterature.

While the Gutenberg Project and Read Print mostly contain books that are free because they are more than 70 years old, the Online Books Page have many titles that are recently published but still availiable for free for some reason.

You will also find special sections for A Celebration of Women Writers, Banned Books Online, and Prize Winners Online, a Foreign Languages Archive.

If you can’t find the book you want for free, read this Pandia Article about buying books online.

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