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Free E-Book Sites Project Gutenberg has volunteers adding pre-1923 books (novels, plays, poetry, works of nonfiction) to its collection continually. To make the texts available to the broadest range of users, Project E-texts are made available in what has become known as "Plain Vanilla ASCII," meaning the same kind of characters you read on a normal printed page--italics, underlines, and bolds have been capitalized. Click on SEARCH from the frame on the left; then enter an author or title. There will be two or more results. Choose a version ending in .txt to view immediately on your computer screen. A good place for beginners. The English Server (eserver.org) The EServer publishes over 30,000 works in the arts and humanities free of charge to readers online. It includes a variety of literature-related materials, including text archives of prose, plays, poetry, and fiction. You may search authors and titles as keywords, but results are more satisfactory if you choose from the list of categories below the search box. The Fiction section includes a good list of plain text books that load very quickly. This page also includes audio clips and Adobe Acrobat pages with graphics. A good place for beginners. More than 17,000 listings of books and historic magazines in English and many foreign languages. You may search by author, title, subject, or language or browse periodical titles. There are also special lists to browse called "A Celebration of Women Writers," "Banned Books Online," and "Prize Winners Online." These are all pre-1923 titles that are out of copyright. You are sent to other e-book sites for the content. So, formatting and viewing practices will vary for each title. Over 10,000 e-books arranged in broad categories. You can also do a keyword search. At the moment, all books are free and available for immediate download in these formats: Ms-Reader, Acrobat, Rocket eBook, Zipped format, iSilo, and Mobipocket. The book annotations are fun to read themselves. Hundreds of classic books and documents can be viewed for free from this site. You may browse the contents by author or title. Content is formatted for viewing on your computer and downloads quickly "page by page." Bartleby.com does not include as many titles as other sites, but its content and structure make it special. You will find the usual classic novels, but you will also find an impressive collection of reference books including current editions of the American Heritage Dictionary, Roget's Thesauri, the Columbia Encyclopedia, and the Encyclopedia of American History as well as the King James Bible, books on English language usage, books of quotations, and histories of English and American literature including The Harvard Classics the Shelf of Fiction that links to the actual texts for your personal enrichment. All of the texts may be searched by keyword from the Bartleby.com front page. The Electronic Text Center from the University of Virginia Library This collection of books and documents is formatted for Internet viewing in SGML or XML format. Click on the word "Collections" at the left to begin a search. Then choose a language--English, French, German, Spanish, or Latin--and then "Online Holdings" to FINALLY get to a list of categories to choose from. Many documents from American history are included in the English language section along with the usual classic authors, but there is also a list of popular best sellers from 1900 to 1930 that are available for viewing. Because of its special formatting, books on this site may include illustrations. Unfortunately, they are more likely to have broken links and require a good deal of mouse-work to go from section to section. 'Not for the faint of heart. Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts (Eric Morgan) The Alex Catalogue contains public domain texts in the areas of American and British Literature and Western Philosophy. A unique feature of the Catalogue is the on-the-fly creation of PDF or ebook (Newton Paperback, Palm Pilot, or Rocket eBook) files. Palm or RocketBook users can load these documents directly to their devices without reformatting. The .pdf format uses your Adobe Acrobat Reader to see text as it appeared in the original text. Electronic Books page for the University of Texas at Austin Still want more? The University of Texas at Austin's library has put together an exhaustive list of e-text sites. Be warned, however, that many of these sites require large subscription fees that make them available only through institutions such as universities, libraries and businesses. You probably know what Cliff Notes are. Well, SparkNotes offers the same help in understanding literature for free online. It also offers free, online guides to philosophy, math, chemistry, economics, computer science, history, physics, psychology, health and nutrition, biography, biology, and astronomy along with reference tools like a dictionary, language translator, the periodic table, and more. If you can't find the e-book you want elsewhere, try this specialized search engine for e-books. Use proper capitalization since the search is case sensitive. The full-text of all books is searched; so look carefully at the results page to be sure which book you want to access. Only free e-text will be searched. This software gives you Internet connectivity! Scroll down to Sign Up or Login to access hundreds of mostly-free, daily news downloads from sources such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, Variety, TV Guide, Salon, and many foreign language news services. You can also download your local movie listings and stock quotes My Yahoo and get your local weather from theWeatherman.com. The sources you choose download automatically when you synchronize your Palm or Pocket PC with your Internet-connected PC.
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