Universal Digital Library

The Universal Digital Library has digitized 1.5 million books and made them available for free on the Web. The site, hosted by Carnegie Mellon University, is high-minded and has lofty ideals, but it's so clunky to use that I gave up after ten minutes of frustration. I had trouble viewing the half dozen or so books I wanted to see using its online viewer. It uses the tiff and DjVu file formats to present the books. Both are bad choices because most people -- including me, it seems -- don't have the appropriate plug-ins installed or installed correctly.

Here's how it describes its vision:

For the first time in history, all the significant literary, artistic, and scientific works of mankind can be digitally preserved and made freely available, in every corner of the world, for our education, study, and appreciation and that of all our future generations.

Up until now, the transmission of our cultural heritage has depended on limited numbers of copies in fragile media. The fires of Alexandria irrevocably severed our access to any of the works of the ancients. In a thousand years, only a few of the paper documents we have today will survive the ravages of deterioration, loss, and outright destruction. With no more than 10 million unique book and document editions before the year 1900, and perhaps 100 million since the beginning of recorded history, the task of preservation is much larger. With new digital technology, though, this task is within the reach of a single concerted effort for the public good, and this effort can be distributed to libraries, museums, and other groups in all countries.

Existing archives of paper have many shortcomings. Many other works still in existence today are rare, and only accessible to a small population of scholars and collectors at specific geographic locations. A single wanton act of destruction can destroy an entire line of heritage. Furthermore, contrary to the popular beliefs, the libraries, museums, and publishers do not routinely maintain broadly comprehensive archives of the considered works of man. No one can afford to do this, unless the archive is digital.

Digital technology can make the works of man permanently accessible to the billions of people all over the world. Andrew Carnegie and other great philanthropists in past centuries have recognized the great potential of public libraries to improve the quality of life and provide opportunity to the citizenry. A universal digital library, widely available through free access on the Internet, will improve the global society in ways beyond measurement. The Internet can house a Universal Library that is free to the people.

You can read more about it on Physorg.com.

17 Ways to Get Free Books

... as told by the Frugal Panda.

LibriVox: Free audiobooks

LibriVox promotes the "acoustical liberation of books in the public domain":

LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and release the audio files back onto the net. Our goal is to make all public domain books available as free audio books.

They recently celebrated the release of their 1,000th audio book. Recent releases include Karl Marx's "Wage-Labour and Capital" and Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue."

The Ex-Classics Web Site

An ex-classic, the site says, is a book "which used to be a classic … but is no longer read much, or at all":

When reading the blurb etc. to a book by Charles Dickens or Charlotte Bronte, say, you will often come across sentences like "Favourite reading included . . ."

If it's good enough for them, you think, it's good enough for me. So off you go to the library or bookshop, to be met first with blank stares and then with the information that the book has been out of print for decades. This web site is dedicated to rescuing these works from obscurity and making them available online, both for reading directly, and for downloading.

Free books from The Online Books Page

The Online Books Page from the University of Pennsylvania library lists "over 25,000 free books on the Web "

What's new at the GPO

The U.S. Government Printing Office maintains a page where you can find new publications online and in print.

Multiple book search tool

ResearchBuzz writes about a search tool that searches Amazon, Google, and Microsoft Live's book search engines all at once. This tool demonstrates once again that it's always wise to remember that search engines don't return the same results, and therefore you should use more than one when you want to be thorough. When I used the tool to search for my name, Amazon turned up four mentions of me (a book with a chapter by my wife that mentioned me in the acknowledgments; a book about the late activist Anne Braden that cited a profile I wrote of her in the footnotes; a book on ombudsmen that looked at coverage of a police shooting I helped cover; and a history of Scott County, Ky, that mentioned my marriage to my wife, a Scott County native). Google missed two of those, but did turn up a book about Kentucky politics that cited CJ profiles of Kentucky towns. Microsoft Live's book search turned up nothing at all. This shows, if nothing else, that these book search engines can be useful tools for researching someone's background, even if that someone hasn't written a book himself.

How to Read a Book

How to Read a Book (PDF) by Paul Edwards, an associate professor of information at the University of Michigan, is a good, short primer on extracting the maximum content from a book in the minimum amount of time.

Literature by e-mail

Daily Lit will email you the portion of a book each day. From the FAQ:

Why read books by email?

Because if you are like us, you spend hours each day reading email but don't find the time to read books. DailyLit brings books right into your inbox in convenient small messages that take less than 5 minutes to read. This works incredibly well not just on your computer but also on a Treo, Blackberry, Sidekick or whatever the PDA of your choice. In the words of Dr. Seuss: Try it, you might like it! (Oops -- it would appear that the actual quote from Green Eggs and Ham is "You do not like them. So you say. Try them! Try them! And you may.")

These are old classics, fiction and non-fiction, that have fallen into the public domain. "We hope to get lots of readers and eventually convince publishers that they should make copyrighted books available on DailyLit as well," the site says.