Online Books, Free, Already

Someone called to ask if we offer ebooks. Though the library does not subscribe to any pay-for-ebooks service, there's an awful lot of material out there which is already available on the open web. Just for example, the Online Books Page pulls together 25,000 titles put up by various free etext projects. They have a what's new listing, which offers an RSS feed. At the moment the What's New array includes such serendipitous treasures as Nabokov's Ada or Ardor from Pennsylvania State University; a 1734 Koran (from Carnegie Mellon University); The Emperor Jones and other plays by Eugene O'Neill at eOneill.com, The Official Website of the Eugene O'Neill Society (now there's a find); and...        ...most impressively from a southwesterner's point of view, Northwestern University has put up the entire 20-volume text of Edward S. Curtis's The North American Indian. 5000 pages of text and 2200 images. The scanning was done from the set owned by Northwestern University Library. The scanned images are housed in Library of Congress' American Memory Collection, the funding largely came from IMLS (Institute for Museum and Library Services). The project was completed in 2003, so it is not in fact new, but apparently new to the OnLine Books Page's database.
       Our About Books and Literature page has a section on Electronic Text which can lead you to many other resources and collections of online book sites. There’s no one site that pulls it ALL together.