eBook College Textbooks

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."

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.

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.

If you don't already have a handy eReader, Kindle 2, and a Netbook it's probably a good time to consider shopping. Since in school you will likely spend a frightening portion of your day cloistered away reading and writing you may as well make yourself mobile, to enjoy the pretense of a social life. In all likelihood you'll be spending late nights in study sessions as well, of course there's no better technique than copious usage of energy drinks.

For a wide selection of eBooks, check Kindle Books.