My Blog

It is not often I feel pleasantly surprised with something. Just look at the Internet. Having witnessed its growth out of university campus and research labs and into the wild, and accepting it as part of my day to day business, it would be normal if I took it for granted and, just like a husband that after many years of life together doesn’t notice his wife’s new haircut, didn’t see anything out of the ordinary with it anymore.

But that is not the case. What left a good taste in my mouth was the amount of free and valuable information in the form of books available. While searching for the text of the French original of “Le Jardin des Supplices” (see my previous post) to compare with my plain paper English translation, I felt flabbergasted with the quantity of sites containing links to books, books and more books. Some of them, like Project Gutenberg, only publish copies of bibliography already in public domain, their copyright having expired. But the quantity of up to date material encompassing the entire spectrum of human knowledge is astounding.

As a quick exercise I decided to make a list of free books resources. The original idea was to create a set of bookmarks, but it will be worth sharing them if I manage to put at least one of you in the mood for some reading. Here it goes.

• The Project Gutenberg
• arXiv.org
• O’Reilly Open Books
• Microsoft Reader Catalog of eBooks
• Blackmask Online
• Wikibooks
• Tech Books For Free
• The National Academies Press
• Books-On-Line
• EServer.org: Accessible Writing
• The Online Books Page

And remember, there are plenty more resources if you just google for them.