Internet Books 17 225 Ns - article by Whimsical Wire Articles

Looking for internet books is easy, though finding them may be a bit more challenging. That is, if you seek a particular title that is not an amazon.com reviewed/available/searchable book. Don’t misunderstand: amazon.com is the place to go for many reasons involving internet books, or buying books online rather. The likely number one source features excerpts, reviews, bibliographical information, and even (for those few of us who care) sales rankings—according to Amazon, that is.

But there are other sources. First, there is an internet bookstore that is also what is called a brick and mortar store. It is one of the oldest and one of the world’s largest (independent!) bookstores, having been established as a storefront then going online as the rest of the planet is doing. Powell’s books. For a lifelong reader and writer, this place is what The Indianapolis or Daytona are to racing, is what Google is to the web, is what the cliché candy store or the 50 zillion ice cream flavors are to kids. The physical property covers a city block, in Portland, Oregon. When you walk in, there is a greeter who hands you a map. A map! That’s the amusement park magnitude of it. That’s the block of billions of books of a dream shop of which I speak. Drool. Powell’s is accessible, accommodating, and affordable—offering used trade, technical, and textbook volumes, as well as rare, mainstream, and other books…of every and any category and genre. I wonder. It may be the next largest housing for books to the Library of Congress, with their 530 miles of books. [Of course, they have one copy of every printed book and every print document (of said worth) ever published.]

So what if my gushing suggestion doesn’t help? What is you are seeking one of those 29 million books that is, you hope, part of some collection of obscure or rare or excerpted internet books? Aha. Follow me.

The Literature Network-- http://www.online-literature.com/ --has many books online, page for page, provided the book is in the public domain. That is, you can access and read the whole book in its completion online, if it is pre-copyright laws and/or has been released by trustees of the author’s works. There you can, for example, check out George Orwell’s classic, 1984, enjoy a volume of Shakespeare’s sonnets, or re-read your childhood favorites by the Brontës, or Austin, or Twain.

Bibliomania--http://www.bibliomania.com/2/-/frameset.html –is another internet books site, but the hosts have categorized the reading materials for us into study, read, and research sections. It’s easy to navigate and just as easy to read…online.

Project Gutenberg--http://www.promo.net/pg/--is, like the above two, a source for free internet books…and more. The Project Gutenberg has been in place since 1971, and has, literally, thousands of volumes, categorized by author, era, title, and other methods.

There are more sites, one that allows you to alter the format of the page so you can read according to your preferences, for example but I cannot seem to locate the URL (the address) for it in my bookmarked files.

And internet books are, of course, not the only online reading pleasure you can indulge in or study and scholarship sources you can access: you can read fiction at mystery stories at MysteryNet.com, can find thousands of online books for English at such places as Unitec’s English Online (http://english.unitecnology. ac.nz/), can read science fiction and fantasy at University of Michigan’s free electronic texts site (http://www.umich.edu/~umfandsf/other/m_etext.html#fandsf).

The internet bookstore is not a limited creature, in other words, restricting you to ordering and waiting—seemingly forever—for a book to arrive by snail mail.

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