Wednesday, 14 January 2004

Where the words are free

Being perennially monetarily challenged and unable to make as many contributions to the sales figures of Strand, Crosswords, Oxford, that new bookstore at Kalaghoda, or even New and Second Hand or the pavement book guys as we would like, we have been trawling the net in search of free reads.
Being also kind and generous, we present our findings to you.
The Online Books Page at the University of Pennsylvania site is a great place to start, with its listings and links to other sites. (This is the site formerly hosted by Carnegie Mellon University, in case you're thinking you may have it bookmarked already. As i did.)
Then there's Project Gutenberg, ibiblio, the Million Books Project and National Academies Press. And the free reference books at Bartleby are an invaluable resource, IMHO.
Closer home, there's also the horrendously designed and very buggy Digital Library of India.
For kid lit, try Children's Storybooks Online, The International Children's Digital Library and Children's Books Online: the Rosetta Project.
This just in: For the SF fans, there's a bunch of free short stories over at SciFi.com's archive, including classic works by Robert Sheckley, Robert Silverberg, Philip José Farmer and Brian W. Aldiss. (Thanks to the bArt man for the link.)

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