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The typical book megasites like Amazon.com won't help
you find a free book online.
But never fear, your internet superhero Brian is here!
And I'm going to give you some tips on how to find that
books online you can either read or download for free.
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[Mandatory self promotional pitch-
Read 42 free pages of
Powerful Body, Peaceful Mind:
How to Heal Yourself with Foods, Herbs, and Acupressure,
my new book free online in pdf form.
On this site, we also offer pdf's of two related books:
The library at University of Pennsylvania has - what you'd
expect from a library - a voluminous collection of links to and
information that will help you find you free
book online (UPenn).
It's astounding that Project Gutenberg (named after the
guy who invented the printing press) even exists. It's the kind
of thing that reassures you that the human spirit is at least
partly good. Their whole goal is to get as many books into electronic
form to be freely distributed as much as possible. So far, they
have put 10,000
free book online, including light reading, heavy reading,
and references. Only downside? It's all in boring, unformatted
.txt files (to be sure everyone can read them).
FreeBooks4Doctors- well, I guess the spirit of all of
these sites is inspiring. Most people assume doctors are rich-
well, medical students aren't, and they need very expensive texts,
and everyone needs access to the full text of medical research,
but often it's prohibitively expensive, or you have to go to a
university library to read them. The free books for doctors site
has a different idea. As they simply say, "FreeBooks4Doctors
was created to promote the free availability of medical books
on the Internet." So, get a medical
free book online there. As of Nov 2004, they have 600 free
books.
Books-On-Line has mostly free book online- Yeah, sorry,
some of these may cost some money, but they have a whole bunch
of them (more than 28,000 right now). Some are scanned, some are
HTML, some are text. Plenty of grist a free book online to read.
For example, here's A
Brief History of the Smallpox Epidemic This site has some
nice links, like the top 10 books of the millenium (try the Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire), movie scripts, and of course
Harry
Potter.
More References and Great Books online: Bartleby.com,
which is a phenomenal site (their American
Heritage College Dictionary features 70,000 audio pronounciations),
contains loads
of free books online. For example, the entire classic 1918
book, Gray's
Anatomy, including his drawings, of course.
The Bestselling all time but still free book online (though the New York
Times pretends it doesn't exist) is the Bible. Here are a couple
of places (Bible.gospelcom.net,
Crosswalk.com)
it read it for free online in whatever translation you prefer.
And if you haven't looked at the Bible in a while, check out Eugene
Peterson's modern language The Message translation, praised
by Bono of U2.
...And if that doesn't do it for you, here's a link to a
list of resources for continuing your search for a free book online.
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