Free eBook Libraries

Google Books

From wikipedia:
"Google Book Search is a tool from Google that searches the full text of books that Google scans, converts to text using optical character recognition, and stores in its digital database. The service was formerly known as Google Print when it was introduced at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2004. When relevant to a user's keyword search, up to three results from the Google Book Search index are displayed above search results in the Google Web Search service (google.com). A user may also search just for books at the dedicated Google Book Search service. Clicking a result from Google Book Search opens an interface in which the user may view pages from the book as well as content-related advertisements and links to the publisher's website and booksellers. Through a variety of access limitations and security measures, some based on user-tracking, Google limits the number of viewable pages and attempts to prevent page printing and text copying of material under copyright.

The Google Book Search service remains[update] in a beta stage but the underlying database continues to grow. Google Book Search allows public-domain works and other out-of-copyright material to be downloaded in PDF format. For users outside the United States, though, Google must be sure that the work in question is indeed out of copyright under local laws. According to a member of the Google Book Search Support Team, "Since whether a book is in the public domain can often be a tricky legal question, we err on the side of caution and display at most a few snippets until we have determined that the book has entered the public domain."

Many of the books are scanned using the Elphel 323 camera at a rate of 1,000 pages per hour.

The initiative has been hailed for its potential to offer unprecedented access to what may become the largest online corpus of human knowledge,as well as criticized for potential copyright violations."

If Google Books doesn't have what you need, you may wish to check Google Scholar to research papers and books.

Google Scholar is a great tool for finding access to free research articles, books, and other academic sources.

From the Google Scholar about page,
"What is Google Scholar?
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. Google Scholar helps you identify the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research."

O'Reilly Open Books

About Open Books (from the O'Reilly Open Books page)

O'Reilly has published a number of Open Books--books with various forms of "open" copyright--over the years. The reasons for "opening" copyright, as well as the specific license agreements under which they are opened, are as varied as our authors.

Perhaps a book was outdated enough to be put out of print, yet some people still needed the information it covered. Or the author or subject of a book felt strongly that it should be published under a particular open copyright. Maybe the book was written collectively by a particular community, as in the case of our Community Press books.

But there's more to making Open Books available online than simply adopting an open license or giving up rights granted under copyright law. The print books need to be converted to a digital format so that they're accessible via the web.

The Internet Public Library or IPL is the first public library designed for the internet. The project was started by the University of Michigan School of Information.

" What is the IPL?

A good question. The IPL is many things:

• the first public library of and for the Internet community


• an experiment, trying to discover and promote the most effective roles and contributions of librarians to the Internet and vice versa


• a group of highly talented, creative, strong-willed people, working hard"

This quote and additional information about the IPL can be found on their about page.

Project Gutenberg

From wikipedia, "Project Gutenberg, abbreviated as PG, is a volunteer effort to digitize, archive and distribute cultural works, as founder Michael Hart said "To encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks."[2]. Founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart, it is the oldest digital library.[3] Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain books. The project tries to make these as free as possible, in long-lasting, open formats that can be used on almost any computer. As of February 2009[update], Project Gutenberg claimed over 27,000 items in its collection. Project Gutenberg is affiliated with many projects that are independent organizations which share the same ideals, and have been given permission to use the Project Gutenberg trademark."

manybooks.net

Manybooks is a site that will convert free eBooks into different readable formats.

From the Manybooks.net about page, "Hi, my name is Matthew McClintock, and I maintain manybooks.net as a service to the internet community at large. If you would like to contact me please use this form.

Updates and information about the working of this site are chronicled in the Site News section.

All of the eBooks from manybooks.net are free, however donations toward the maintenance of the site are welcome.

Many of the etexts are from the November, 2003 Project Gutenberg DVD, which contains the entire Project Gutenberg archives except for the Human Genome Project and audio eBooks, due to size limitations, and the Project Gutenberg of Australia eBooks, due to copyright. As of July 2004 most current PG texts are available here, usually within the week of release. There are also public domain and creative commons works from other sources.

Zip archives are stored in the same directory structure as on the DVD, with Author, Title, and related information stored in a MySQL database. Pages are built with PHP and served using the Apache webserver. The server is a 1.66GHz Intel Core Duo Mac mini running Mac OS X 10.4, located at macminicolo.net.

eBooks are generated on demand using a variety of tools, and cached for future readers - which means that the first time anyone requests an eBook in a particular format it will take a bit longer to deliver, but the next time that eBook is requested it will be sent immediately."

Scribd
"About Us

Scribd began with a simple observation - that there's a writer in all of us. And that even more fundamental than our desire for self-expression is our need to learn and be inspired.

Today, Scribd is the place where you publish, discover and discuss original writings and documents. More than 50 million people each month are finding or sharing fun, functional or fantastical writings and documents on Scribd.com and tens of thousands of other websites that have embedded Scribd's document reader.

We built a technology that's broken all barriers to traditional publishing and in the process also built one of the largest readerships in the world.
Democratizing Publishing

With Scribd's iPaper document reader, anyone can easily upload and immediately share their original works on Scribd.com or any other website. iPaper transforms PDF, Word, PowerPoint and many other file formats into an elegant web display. Your work can be shared with Scribd's community of passionate readers, and because every word of your document is indexed for search engine optimization, your screenplay, novel or even sheet music and recipes also can be discovered by the world.

You can create (or liberate from your hard drive) anything you want to share - that comparative essay on Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, the first three chapters of the book you've been meaning to finish, journal entries from your trip to Thailand... Scribd provides a creative and useful new platform for readers, authors, publishers and anyone else seeking to express themselves, share ideas and exchange information."

Book SearchR
" Book-Searchr performs search of free downloadable ebooks across the whole Internet. So in search results you will get a list of direct links on books (PDF, DOC, RTF, CHM, HTML, TXT files) that you can download and read for free.

This service will help you to find many links on best online books in different areas: management, fiction, life, business, computer, children, medical, etc. If you cannot find a text of your favourite book using common search engines then Book-Searchr should certainly help with that. "

Bartleby.com has some free information as well as books for sale.

Free e-books is an excellent directory of ebooks (this is their free list). Although founded for Australia and New Zealand, there are a wide range of global repositories for free ebooks.

Top 25 Free e-books Sites, the Definitive List in RotorBlog by Arnold Zafra. Well at least it's a pretty big list, just a warning some of the links may not work.

Kindle Book Store

Sony's eBook store

Many Books.net


(thanks to Lanier67 for posting the intriguing bookstore pic)