Web Scout
Free Books Online in English and Spanish
By Marcia Koth de Paredes
The books of very important writers, primarily those for whom copyright rules no longer apply and those who publish for Internet only, are already online to download without charge. The following includes a selection of English and Spanish portals to free eBooks. I also include a couple of examples of cooperative authoring of books online since these are experiments that undoubtedly will affect the way we think about and use books in the future. Books for children and youth will be topics for future Web Scouts.
The following portals provide access to free eBooks, some primarily for eBooks in English and others for Spanish.
Project Gutenberg
http://www.gutenberg.org
Project Gutenberg is the oldest service for free eBooks on the Internet. The collection of about 16,000 books was and is produced by hundreds of volunteers. The web provides interesting lists of the Top 100 downloads daily, for the past week, for the past month. There are also links to audio-books.
Internet Public Library
http://www.ipl.org/
University of Michigan School of Information. More than 24,000 volumes. Click books. Here you find health, hobbies, cooking, education, and many more subtopics.
University of Adelaide Library eBooks
http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/centers.html
An excellent portal to Electronic Text Centers in the U.S. and Australia. Also includes approximately 700 books online. You may search by author and find a biographical note plus possible downloads of several books. For example, four of Thomas Paine's principal works are available. They also have a portal to links about the Great Books. For example, http://www.mirror.org/books/gb.home.html is a page prepared by Ken Roberts Computer Consultants to ease access to many of the great classics in English translation
The OnlineBooks Page
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu
University of Pennsylvania. Listing over 20,000 free eBooks. Includes features about women authors, prize books, search by author, topic, title.
University of California Berkeley Sunsite
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Collections
Portal to classics, books about California, science books and others.
University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/collections/languages/english/
Philosophy, literature, Afro-American experience, special collections, early-American, religious (Bible, Book of Mormon, Koran) and more. The University of Virginia is working in several languages. Here is the link to Spanish books online http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/spanish/index.html
Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes
http://www.cervantesvirtual.com
Portal to complete works to more than 3,000 classics from Spain and Latin America, as well access to video, audio, magazine and other collections.
Biblioteca Digital de la Universitat de Valencia
http://parnaseo.uv.es/Webs/Bibliotecas.htm
Portal to books in Spanish, some in Catalan, French.
Experiments
Experiment with Wikibooks
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page
This is a web program to prepare a collection of open-content textbooks that anyone can edit. The English version was started in 2003 and there are currently over 9,000 textbook modules under construction. On the current home page you see the top 10 active book projects, new wikibooks and a recommendation for the “Book of the Month.” Spanish wikibook experiments may be found at http://es.wikibooks.org/wiki/Portada
Experiment with Audio-Books
http://wiredforbooks.org/
Ohio University, in collaboration with WOUB radio-television, has created a collection of books read, many by the authors themselves, for downloading free. Try out Alice in Wonderland, A Christmas Carol, Martin Sheen reading Tag ore's poems. Audio books will become more important as we discover the delights of Mp3.
Buy Books via Internet
Purchasing both hard cover and eBooks via Internet is fairly simple these days and couriers make deliveries if you are in a hurry. It is a good idea to make payments with credit cards with a low maximum line of credit. There are no import taxes on books in Peru.
Major U.S. online booksellers are:
Amazon
http://www.amazon.com
Barnes & Noble
http://www.barnesandnoble.com
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