I repeat myself when it comes to the experience of having to shop in a brick-and-mortar store where we serious book shoppers are trying to access a book or magazine or tape on shelves that are blocked by men, women, and kids, laying on the floor, doing their nails, talking on cell phones, or reading then returning the items to the wrong place without paying for anything they have laid their grubby hands on.
I defer to, then, the less intrusive and less sanity-threatening process of researching, finding, and buying Books Online. That is, because of the genius of Gates, Jobs, and hundreds of others, we can shop for online books and avoid the b.s. of doing so in person…with—God help us—other humans who may not have the respect for books or vendors we have.
But as well as buying Books Online, we can also find Books Online that are not for sale but are in the free domain, as they have been in existence, were written, or were approved for re-reading before or beyond intellectual property/copyright laws. In other words, there are thousands of Books Online that you do not have to struggle to find, buy, or access.
Now when you do a general search for online books, be forewarned: you will get such online books as I describe here. You will also get too many online books results with your search engine from those selling Books Online…such is the versatility or virtue of the vendors cashing in, etc.. So I will start you off with a list of books online that are not bestsellers, contemporary text books for science class, or any kind of books for sale. All of the following, that is, are FREE books online…literally:
Bibliomania.com – A spunky, user friendly site that aficionados and students of literature alike will find useful. Data base of 2,000 Books Online is sectored by genre/category—fiction, drama, nonfiction, biographies, religious texts, articles, and more.
LiteratureOnline.com (http://www.online-literature.com/) – easy access, books online include classics, The Bible, numerous (almost all) Shakespearean works, quote database, and hundreds of chapter by chapter summaries.
Project Gutenberg (http://www.promo.net/pg/) – As the site managers describe it, Project Gutenberg’s Books Online include “203 New eBooks released during October 2002, 1975 New eBooks produced in 2002 (they were 1240 in 2001),” totaling 6,267 Project Gutenberg eBooks.
Wired for Books (http://wiredforbooks.org/) - Not only features books online, but poetry, oratories, and audio versions of literature read by the living writers (reading aloud their own works) and read by writers and literati (reading aloud the works of those long gone but not forgotten).
So maybe when you search and want to find not ALL Books Online but books that are actually, chapter for chapter and page by page on…line, you might start with those sites I list here…or type in a new search phrase that includes the word “free”?