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A snapshot of what's available, February 15th, 2013 In-Service Day
       
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2.0  Online Encyclopedias
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3.0  Online Books
   3.1  Digital Textbooks
   3.2 Self-Publishing

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7.0  Free Downloads

8.0 Works Cited 		    3.0 Online Books

There was much excitement for the concept of eBooks early on.  Imagine having entire books that you could read right off your computer screen, laptop, netbook or even your cell phone.  For publishing companies this excitement turned onto terror rather quickly as they faced the prospect of going through the same copyright nightmare that the recording industry was experiencing with the advent of free internet file sharing and MP3 music files.  Below are some of the online resources you can still access to read some books online for free.  Note that these book "projects" are still developing so you might want to check back with them in a year or so.

Project Gutenberg
This website offers over 100,000+ books.  They are not all free but over 30,000 of them are simply because their copyright has run out.  The books are in various formats that can be displayed on just about any computer device including ePub & Kindle formats.  They also have sheet music and audio books.

Google Books Project
The ultimate goal of this project is to create “a comprehensive, searchable, virtual card catalog of all books in all languages.”  You can read more about their plans and progress so far here.  Basically, they are scanning the text of complete books from major libraries all around the world.  Here's a video to show you how it's done.  The texts of these books are then searchable online through books.google.com.   In some cases the entire book is available online, in some cases just parts of the book and in some cases only a book review is available.
Google Books and Project Gutenberg are both works in progress.  In both cases some major legal and logistical hurdles still need to be surmounted but they are working to make entire libraries available.  Here's a link to he most recent agreement Google reached with publishers:  http://books.google.com/googlebooks/agreement/

LibriVox Free MP3 Books
This website offers free access to audio books that are in the public domain.  These books are in an MP3 format and they can be easily downloaded to a computer, saved on an MP3 player (such as an iPod) or listened to directly off the internet.  You can also volunteer to become a reader for LibriVox.   Some other websites that offer a similar service:  etc.usf.edu/lit2go, free-books.org, write2teach.com & freeclassicaudiobooks.com.  And of course there are websites that sell audio books:  AudioBooksBay.com, AudioBooks.com & Amazon Audio Books.

E-Books, Digital Readers, Net Book Computers and the Future
So how do you read all these digitized books without having to be tethered to your internet connected computer?  How about an "E-Book Reader"?  Here's a link to information about several of the ones that are currently available including the popular Kindle:  http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/E-book_Reader_Matrix.  Beyond the uni-tasking "E-Book Readers" are Net Books and tablet computers like the iPad from Apple.  These low cost, lightweight and durable mini-computers with solid state flash memory are designed for smooth wireless internet access.  They could hold thousands of books, access even more multimedia through the internet and are leading us into a new form of information technology and an online software environment called: "cloud computing" but that's a topic for later.

The Next Generation of E-Book Readers  -  Tablets:

 

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