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Over 20,000 free online books
Thursday, January 15, 2009 — posted by Sheila Loring
I found the coolest online resource for free books! shop.ebrary.com offers over 20,000 full-text online books in a variety of topics -- everything from the humanities to science, technology, and even sheet music. You can search the text, title, subject, author, or publisher and specify the type of publication (book, sheet music, map, journal, etc.) and the language. When you get the list of search results, you click a book title to see the search terms highlighted on the page.The ebrary reader, a quick DLL installation, lets you add the book to your bookshelf, highlight text, print, copy and paste, navigate, define words, translate, buy the book, search, and bookmark pages. For example, my bookshelf contains a book called Dreams in Myth, Medicine, and Movies. I've bookmarked a page that discusses surrealism in Hieronymus Bosch paintings. In the bookshelf, the bookmark shows up as an icon that you click to view the page. The ebrary reader really sets apart this collection of books from Gutenberg and eScholarship.
The ebrary actually includes books you'll recognize, such as Michael Kay's XSLT 2.0 Programmer's Reference (3rd edition -- a little old but still relevant) and the Adobe Classroom in a Book series. I even found a book called Opportunities in Technical Writing by Jay Gould.
There's one catch. You must set up an account with at least $5. That's to cover copying and pasting or printing that you might choose to do. I think it's a small price to pay, particularly if you never spend it!
Do you know any free resources for similar books -- particularly XML/XSLT books?
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