The Web Library:
Building a World Class Personal Library with Free Web Resources
Online companion to the
book.
Frequently updated: last update = 5-23-06
copyright
Nick
Tomaiuolo 2006
Chapter Five: Books in the Web Library
RedLightGreen
Introducing the "poor man's" -- or is it the "smart man's"
-- 'WorldCat.' Search
120 million titles in RedLightGreen for library holdings; plus get a citation manager!
Adobe Digital Book Index
The Digital Book Index
provides access to more than 80,000 titles records from more than 1800
commercial
and non-commercial publishers, universities, and
various private sites. About 48,000 of these books, texts, and documents
are available free, while many others are available at very modest
cost.
"The Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts is a collection of public domain
documents from American and English literature as well as Western
philosophy." Eric Lease Morgan offered many of these texts in downloadable
formats for handheld devices.
Baen
Free Library
Eric Flint's depository of 80 free sci-fi books; free to
read or download.
Bartleby.com
Approximately 200 texts, some
copyrighted,
including the Harvard Classics (70 volumes) and Gray's
Anatomy
(over 1,200 illustrations)
Bibliomania
Thorough index of online texts ranging from Louisa May Alcott's "Little
Women" to Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray". Contains fiction,
non-fiction, and poetry sections, with a limited reference section.
The British
Columbia Digital Library
A guide to free, primarily full-text digital collections and a content
repository, started by David Mattison, MLS, in 2000. It is hosted by the BC
Community Networks Association.
Christian Classics Ethereal Library
Contains complete versions in electronic format of numerous non-fiction
classic Christian books including 38 volumes of the most important
writings from the first 800 years of the church, writings by St.
Augustine, John Calvin, George Fox, Martin Luther, and others. Fiction
authors include Chesterton, Dostoevsky, MacDonald, and Tolstoy. Links to
Biblical reference sites are also included.
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
This is a server of the complete works of William Shakespeare, provided by
The Tech-MIT. The HTML versions of these plays, and the links, are
Copyright © 1995.
Confucian Analects/ Lun Yu
The sayings of Confucius in twenty-one languages.
Digital Book Index
Indexes over 80,000 titles from commercial and non-commercial publishers,
universities, and various private sites.
The English Server Drama Collection
A collection of both long and short English drama plays and criticism
(complete scripts) that includes authors like: Shakespeare (complete
works,) Shaw, Johnson, Gay, Moliere, Biggs and Sophocles. Also has links
to other theater sites.
The English Server Fiction Collection
Collection of online fiction texts. Includes short stories and novels by
authors like: Alcott, Bronte, Bulfinch, Cather, Crane, Dickens, Dreiser,
Elliot, Twain, Hardy and Fielding (among others.) Also has criticism.
Folklore and Mythology Electronic Texts
Resource providing links to mythology texts. Arranged alphabetically, users
can browse everything from popular fairytales to Russian ghost stories.
Free
eBooks .NET
Hundreds of free ebooks in Microsoft Reader, in PDF format, ZIP files,
and self-extractable (.exe) files. Includes business books, fiction,
psychology, philosophy, health and medicine.
An index to the "Great Books in English Translation" with links to the
sites.
Great Literature On-Line
Online versions of classic literary works.
Manybooks
This site takes texts from Project Gutenberg and makes them downloadable for a
variety of PDAs and eBook readers. Check it for over 10,000 titles.
Online
Books Page
17,000 electronic texts available at
no
charge. Works included may be in e-book
reader formats, PDF, page
images
embedded into web pages, HTML,
and ASCII. Searchable.
Oxford Text Archive
The OTA works closely with members of the
Arts and Humanities academic community to collect, catalogue, and
preserve high-quality electronic texts for research and teaching. The
OTA currently distributes more than 2500 resources in over 25 different
languages, and is actively working to extend its catalogue of holdings.
At present there are no charges for downloading texts.
Perseus
Tufts University Perseus Project provides the text of
classical books and texts.
Pink Monkey Digital Library
1,800
free classic literary works for online
reading. There may not be anything new here, though (possibly) this list
may complement some of the other classic public domain book sites. Lots of
ads, however.
Poet's Corner
"One of the largest and oldest text resources on the web." The goal of
this project is to create a user-friendly library of works that promotes
browsing and exploring through a site that spans thousands of works by
hundreds of authors covering thousands of years.
Project
Gutenberg
Over 13,225 texts in "Plain Vanilla
ASCII"
readable and downloadable to most
computers.
University of California Press
1400 ebooks, 400 are free. The site is
strong in American Studies, Asian History, anthropology, gender Studies,
history, literature, philosophy and politics, but many subject areas are
represented.
University
of Virginia Electronic Texts
5,000 texts publicly accessible
without
charge including about 1,600 electronic
books for the Microsoft Reader
and
Palm handheld devices.
The World Wide School
Approximately 2000 full text documents. Example:
Did your son forget his copy of Tale of Two Cities at school (but has an
assignment due tomorrow)? Check this site!
Examples of Hypertext in
Literature
Eastgate Reading Room
Offers several stories in hypertext format. An interesting group of reads.
Horizons
An index to hypertext fiction.
Original hypertext fiction; reviews and criticism of hypertext fiction;
hypertext converted from print; other Web sources.
The Little Machine
SUNY (Albany) hypertext literary magazine.
Lune
"A journal of electronic writing and art"
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Library