Tens of thousands are books are now available free on a variety of web sites. These books have been digitized and can be read, downloaded or printed. You will NOT find your textbooks, the latest fiction or most books that have appeared in the past 50 years. Most titles that can be accessed are titles not in copyright - most published before 1923. The following are a sampling of the many eBook resources available.
Chicago State University eBook Collection
Our collection contains over 5,000 eBooks including 1,972 titles we have access to via our membership in IDAL (Illinois Digital Academic Library) as well as 3,457 publicly - accessible eBooks. These two collections can be found at http://www.netlibrary.com/. You must register and set up a free account on campus to access these resources.
Chicago State University Fact Book
URL: http://library.csu.edu/eresources/ebooks/csu07.pdfContains information regarding the university, The CSU Fact Book provides data including tuition, fee, budgeting, enrollment, demographic, graduation, and productivity data.
The University of Illinois Library Weblog
URL: http://www.library.uiuc.edu/blog/digitizedbotw/This blog provides access to the digitized book of the week as presented by the University of Illinois. The University is digitizing and contributing to the Internet Archive books and serials from its collections that focus on Illinois history, literature, and natural resources; rural life and agriculture; and railroad history and engineering.
Project Gutenburg
URL: http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_PageProject Gutenburg is the first and largest single collection of eBooks. As of August 2006, there are over 19,000 eBooks available, with an average of 400 more being added each month. They cannot publish any texts still in copyright without permission. This generally means that the texts are taken from books published pre-1923. You won't find the latest bestsellers or modern computer books here. You will find the classic books from the start of this century and previous centuries, from authors like Shakespeare, Poe, and Dante.
Google book search
URL: http://books.google.com/ (Regular)URL: http://books.google.com/advanced_book_search (Advanced)
Working with many major universities, Google's Book Search offers differing levels of access. "If we've determined that a book is out of copyright, or the publisher or rightsholder has given us permission, you'll be able to page through the entire book from start to finish, as many times as you like. If the book is in the public domain, you'll also be able download, save and print a PDF version to read at your own pace". Although this promises to be a vast resource, many books are not available in full text format.
The Internet Archive
URL: http://www.archive.org/details/textsThe Internet Archive is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, they provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public. In addition to text, this site provides access to audio, music and moving images.
The Universal Digital Library
URL: http://www.ulib.org/index.htmlThe mission is to create a Universal Library which will foster creativity and free access to all human knowledge. As a first step in realizing this mission, it is proposed to create the Universal Library with a free-to-read, searchable collection of one million books, available to everyone over the Internet. Within 10 years, it is our expectation that the collection will grow to 10 Million books. The result will be a unique resource accessible to anyone in the world 24x7, without regard to nationality or socioeconomic background.
Commercial/For Profit Sites
EBooks.com
URL: http://www.ebooks.com/This is a for-profit site that will sell you a book to download. Has 102,000 popular, professional and academic eBooks from the world's leading publishers.
