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!
Librarian
Rizvi
Institute of Management
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