More and more, the World is going digital. This is especially true with the most 'analog' of technologies – the Book, invented over??500 years ago.??
The Google Books Library Project has been stealing the headlines lately, with a modest approach. "Our ultimate goal is to work with publishers and libraries to create a comprehensive, searchable, virtual card catalog of all books in all languages that helps users discover new books and publishers discover new readers." Most modern books in the project are just searchable snippets, but many books (mostly those that are out of copyright) have the full text available for searching and reading.
Search for a title at Google Books now!
There are many other projects going on that are working hard to make 'eBooks' available for all. Amazon has a Kindle book reader for sale that will store 3,500 books on a very small and portable device, but Amazon is taking eBooks beyond their own device, and making it easy to search through the vast electronic libraries and other eBook projects.??
The Amazon Free eBook Collections page is an amazing jumping off point to search for nearly 2 million electronic book titles – and you don't need to spend a dime on a Kindle to play along if you don't want to. There is a Kindle 'app' for iOS Devices like the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, as well as Android Devices, BlackBerry phones, the Mac and the PC??so that you can download and read these titles whenever, wherever.??
The Free eBook Collections page not only links you to the Kindle Store to buy eBooks, but also to other free eBook projects and collections, such as:
- Internet Archive, where 1.8 million free titles are available
- Open Library, housing over 1 million free titles
- Project Gutenberg, one of the original free eBook sources, with over 30,000 free titles
- ManyBooks.net, with over 26,000 free titles
Long story short, if you are looking for a particular title – especially something released in the last 50 years – you may have a hard time finding it for free. However, if you are looking to read classic titles for free, such as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, A Tale of Two Cities, or even Frankenstein to commemorate Halloween which is just around the corner, then the resources in this post will make you a very, very happy reader.