Free E-Books at ManyBooks.net

Writing the last post about Lending Library by the Internet Archives inspired me to write about ManyBooks.net. For those who own or plan on owning digital e-readers, the manybooks.net project might be of interest. It offers over 28,000 digitized books that are free to download and keep. Books are available in variety of formats to satisfy the various e-readers' requirements.

Users may browse books by titles, authors, genres, or languages. Users may also view the most popular titles or the recommended titles. RSS feeds to all new titles, new titles sorted by category, new titles sorted by language, or site news are available.

And where did all these books come from?

Many of the etexts are from the November, 2003 Project Gutenberg DVD, which contains the entire Project Gutenberg archives except for the Human Genome Project and audio eBooks, due to size limitations, and the Project Gutenberg of Australia eBooks, due to copyright. As of July 2004 most current PG texts are available here, usually within the week of release. There are also public domain and creative commons works from many other sources.

Donations are welcome and for more information about the project, the site, or new titles, you may subscribe to any of the RSS feeds, or to ManyBooks.net twitter account or you may email to Matthew McClintock who maintains the website.

Happy Reading!

Digital Lending Library By Internet Archives

I have always been a fan of the Internet Archives, or as many call it (including me) the Wayback Machine. I use it to see what websites looked like years ago or to locate a website that has been taken down. The Internet Archive periodically takes snapshots of the web and archives it; a pretty neat concept. Users can browse through over 150 billion websites that have been archived since 1996. The Internet Archives work on many projects including the Bookmobile, Scanning Services, Archive-It, or the already mentioned Wayback Machine. One of the newest initiatives is the Digital Lending Library.

Checking out digital versions of books that are automatically returned after two weeks is as easy as logging onto the Internet Archive's Open Library Site, announced digital librarian and Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle. By integrating this new service, more than seventy thousand current books - best sellers and popular titles - are borrowable by patrons of libraries that subscribe to Overdrive.com's Digital Library Reserve. Additionally, many other books that are not commercially available but are still of interest to library patrons are available to be borrowed from from participating libraries using the same digital technology.

Currently, OpenLibrary.org is making available:

• More than one million digital versions of older books are now available for free download in a variety of formats.
• Over 70,000 current digital books to those with a library card from many of the over 11,000 libraries that subscribe to the OverDrive service.
• Genealogical books from the Boston Public Library.
• How-to and technical book collection via the Internet Archive
• Marine life reference materials from the Marine Biological Laboratory and Wood Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
• Spanish texts from Universidad Francisco Marroguin in Guatemala.

Ulysses S. Grant Digital Collection

Mississippi State University has digitized a collection consisting of 31 volumes of The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant.

The Ulysses S. Grant Collection housed at Mississippi State University Libraries consists of some 15, 000 liner feet of correspondence, research notes, artifacts, photographs, scrapbooks, and memorabilia and includes information on Grant's childhood from his birth in 1822, his later military career, Civil War triumphs, tenure as commanding general after the war, presidency, and his post-White House years until his death in 1885. There are also 4,000 published monographs on various aspects of Grant's life and times.

Users can browse or search the collection.

Library of Congress Puts Thousands of Historic Books Online

With a little bit of a delay, the December 24, 2009 press release announced that Library of Congress has put thousands of historic books online.

Washington — Nearly 60,000 books prized by historians, writers and genealogists, many too old and fragile to be safely handled, have been digitally scanned as part of the first-ever mass book-digitization project of the U.S. Library of Congress, the world’s largest library. Anyone who wants to learn about the early history of the United States, or track the history of their own families, can read and download these books for free.

'The Library chose books that people wanted, but that were too old and fragile to serve to readers. They won’t stand up to handling,' said Michael Handy, who co-managed the project, which is called Digitizing American Imprints.

'Many of these books cover a period of Western settlement of the United States — 1865–1922 — and offer historians a trove of information that’s otherwise tough to locate,' he said. Books published before 1923 are in the public domain in the United States because their U.S. copyrights have expired.

More information is available in a Library of Congress video.

Edgar Allan Poe Digital Collection

Via Open Culture, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin has launched a website dedicated to the life and legacy of Edgar Allan Poe.

This digital archive was launched to accompany the 2009 Poe Bicentennial exhibition, “From Out That Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Edgar Allan Poe,” a joint venture of the Ransom Center and the Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia. The digital collection incorporates images of all Poe manuscripts and letters at the Ransom Center with a selection of related archival materials, two books by Poe annotated by the author, sheet music based on his poems, and portraits from the Ransom Center collections. Poe’s manuscripts and letters are linked to transcriptions on the website of the Poe Society of Baltimore.

The digital collection includes, among many others, the Poe Manuscript Works, Poe Letters and Documents, Letters to Poe, Poe editions, or Poe Newspapers.

The Harry Ransom Center also features the Gutenberg Bible and Mike Wallace digital collections.

World Digital Library

The World Digital Library will make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials. The objectives of the World Digital Library are to promote international and inter-cultural understanding and awareness, provide resources to educators, expand non-English and non-Western content on the Internet, and to contribute to scholarly research.

National libraries from around the world, including the Library of Congress, have contributed to the project.