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Books, Books, Books
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Nowadays you can do your family history reading anywhere. By Mia5793 (Own work) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons
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Nowadays, however, the content of huge numbers of old books are freely available at the click of a button over the internet. Whole texts of books can be accessed (and searched) on screen within seconds from the comfort of your own living room. You can read such treasures straightaway online or download them to another device such as a Kindle, iPhone or Ipad for future consumption, providing that your device has a ‘reader’ for the book format that is on offer. Additionally, in many cases, books can be downloaded as searchable pdf files which can be easily read by most desktop and handheld computers. A very useful article on the different ways of reading books via electronic devices is at www.moneysavingexpert.com/shopping/free-e-books#baen.
Whether you have a particular title in mind or just want to browse areas in which you are interested, here are some of the top websites to get you started.
Some large sites of general interest
Some large sites of general interest
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| Man Reading - John Singer Sargent, undated. Wikimedia Commons |
1.
Internet Archive
A not-for-profit
archive including millions of digitised books. Special collections include: American
Libraries, Canadian Libraries, European Libraries and Project Gutenberg (see
below).
2.
Digital Books Index
This includes a
wide range of texts from the ‘highly scholarly to the contemporary and
popular.’ It is a Meta-index for most major e-book sites as well as thousands
of smaller specialist sites. Over 14000 of the 165,000 texts are available for
free.
3.
Universal Digital Library Repository
This project has the long term aim of digitising all the
books ever written! Between 2006 and 2007, however, it achieved a smaller goal
of digitising 1 million books (The Million Book Digital Library Project). The
project was initiated at Carnegie Mellon University and has participating
universities in places as far away as China, India and Egypt. More books are
continually being scanned at 50 global centres.
4.
Project Gutenberg
This project provides the free full text of over 50,000 free e-books (mainly pre-1930s and so out of copyright) which can be read online or downloaded. There is no fee or registration process on this site but readers are encouraged to donate a small amount towards the cost of further digitisation projects.
5. Wikibooks
www.wikibooks.org
This is a ‘collaborative
book authoring’ website. Volunteer users from all over the world work together
to write textbooks and other types of instructional books on many topics. If
you have an area of specialty, you could join in. Otherwise, search the site to
see if there is anything that might help your research.
6. The E-server
This site
hosts short writings by over 35,000 writers, editors and scholars. The history
section has items on such diverse topics as ‘medieval carpentry’ and ‘Russia 1914-1917.’
The non-fiction section includes the full text of such key historical works as
Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of
Dreams.
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7.
Just Free Books
Searches
the content of more than 700 websites that offer books without charge,
including www.gutenberg.org, www.wikibooks.org and www.archive.org.
8.
Google Books
More than 2 million full text books now in the public
domain are available for free via this site. Many more copyrighted books are
included via excerpts and snippets.
9.
Hathi Trust
www.hathitrust.org
Based on a partnership of academic
& research institutions, this offers millions of titles digitized from
libraries around the world. It includes the full
text of books, monographs and pamphlets out of copyright and covers the arts
and humanities, sciences and social sciences. You can also search for
individual words within books.
10. Internet Public Library
This site, hosted
by the University of Michigan, is no longer adding new material but it can
still be searched. It has over 16,000
texts searchable by author, title or Dewey Decimal Classification and is especially
strong on 19th century English language items.
11. British
Library
Access to digitised copies of some manuscripts and books
in the British Library’s collections, with descriptions of their contents. The
site currently features the full text of the Library's latest major
acquisition, the St Cuthbert Gospel.
Links to free
digitised early manuscripts and books elsewhere on the web.
·
www.bl.uk/reshelp/findhelprestype/webres/rarefacsimile/
Links to free digitised facsimiles of early
manuscripts and books elsewhere on the web.
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