Finding Public Domain Books Online

Sometimes you may need to consult the text of a book you don’t own and don’t have time to find at your library or a bookstore (or via Amazon or the other bookselling websites).

If the book you need to inspect (or, God forbid, actually attempt to read on a screen) is an older one, you may be in luck if you have a good Internet connection.

The Internet contains dozens of websites that archive the texts of books (and plays and stories and other types of texts) whose copyrights have expired – everything from familiar and obscure classical works to more recently published titles whose copyright protections first expired on January 1, 2022.

Five years ago, Nothing in the Rule Book posted links to 45 such resources. Take a look at the list.

The same year that Nothing in the Rule Book posted its list, EBook Friendly published a similar list of 25 websites containing downloadable books, and described each of these sites. Take a look at EBook Friendly’s list.

Happy hunting!

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Goodreads Welcomes Its 10,000,000th Member

According to its website, Goodreads “is a place where you can see what your friends are reading and vice versa. You can create “bookshelves” to organize what you’ve read (or want to read). You can comment on each other’s reviews. You can find mind-blowing new books.

Probably the most popular of the several free, Internet-based book-recommending and book-organizing sites, Goodreads has announced it now has over 10 million subscribers.

Details at the Los Angeles Times and at TechCrunch.

Found at Shelf Awareness

Google as a Gateway to Books

Although most bibliophiles prefer actually reading their books with the physical book in their hands, many of us gratefully and habitually use the Internet to find some of those books. In fact, there are so many useful tools for bibliophiles available on the Internet that we’ve made a list of of faves and dubbed it the Booklover’s Toolbox.

One bibliophilic Internet site not listed in the Toolbox is Google Books. The helpful folks over at MakeUseof.com have put together a bunch of ways booklovers might make use of Google Books, Google’s ambitious project to digitize every book ever printed – and, apparently a lot of issues of magazines, too.

Read MakeUseof.com’s article.

NPR’s Website Full of Book Love

We won’t go so far as to assume that most avid booklovers and public library users are also frequent listeners to National Public Radio programs, but we’d be surprised if there wasn’t a huge overlap among these groups.

In any case, if you haven’t taken a look at NPR’s website lately, you might want to give it a look-see (and possibly add it to your Internet Favorites). The site was recently redesigned, is easy to navigate and search, and is very rich in information – including lots of book-related interviews, lists, and features.

Found at the Librarian in Black