Free E-Books Abound (In Other Languages, Too)

The amount of material available on the web is ever-increasing, as we all know. One area of expansion that should be of interest to librarians is the collection of free e-books.

First, we have Project Gutenberg,"... the first and largest single collection of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today." Click here for further information about this project.

You can search the Project Gutenberg catalog here. Notice that they have many titles in other languages. They have over 50 titles in Chinese, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Tagalog.

And, if you have an aggregator, you can subscribe to their RSS feed and be notified of the new books they receive (http://www.gutenberg.org/feeds/today.rss).

Adobe has many classics in PDF form (of course). See their listings here (scroll down to see the classics).

The ALA Techsource Blog recently mentioned the new service, Wowio. Read about that here.

You also have Google Books in which you can perform and advanced search by Author, Title, Year, or even ISBN.