How about reading a book online, for free - eBook
Did you know that there is an online searchable database
of million of the world's books that's completely free to use? For several
years now the Internet Archive has been
collecting millions of scanned and text versions of fiction, popular books,
childrens books, historical texts, and academic books that are searchable in
their OpenLibrary.
There have been other efforts along these lines such as
the Gutenberg Project which
currently offers 42,000 free online ebooks and Lit2Go which comes from Florida's Educational Technology
Clearinghouse. Lit2Go offers a huge free
collection of online audio books that can be downloaded as MP3's and played on
just about any digital device including your phone. Many of the books and
stories that our students read can be found here.
Perhaps the largest collection of online books has been
created by none other than Google. In 1996 the founders of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, were graduate students at
Standford University where were working to create a web crawler that could
someday index online digital libraries. The webcrawler they created
eventually developed into the Google Search engine that we are familiar with
today but they did return to their original digital library project in 2002.
Today the Google Books project includes millions of
scanned books and magazines, many of which can be downloaded for free. You can
learn more about this history of this project here.
The Google Books project can be found here: http://books.google.com
They have already scanned millions of books from major universities all across the nation. You can search their database and read the books right off the screen like this:
Many more books are available for sale at the Google Play Store where you can download them to a digital
device of your choice, for a price of course. Apple is also selling ebooks for
it's portable devices (such as the iPad, iPhone and iTouch) as part of it's iTunes Apps Store.
It should also be noted that book publishers and authors
are not exactly thrilled with all this digital scanning of their books. For
example, there was a multi-year legal battle over the Google Books project
which was finally settled in October of 2009.
Source | http://www.180techtips.com/
Regards
Mr. Pralhad Jadhav
Master of Library &
Information Science (NET Qualified)
Research Scholar (IGNOU)
Senior Manager @ Knowledge
Repository
Khaitan & Co
Twitter Handle | @Pralhad161978
Mobile @ 9665911593
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