Theatre Literature Found Cheap and Easy Online

The Issue
          Considerable debate has risen lately concerning the future of digital publication, or "e-books." Digital publishing's adversaries tend to believe that digital print is harder to read than ink and much more difficult, if not impossible, to read from the most comfortable chair in the house. The advocates seem to believe that this is the future, that we will all get used to digital print, and that if you build it techno, they will come. If you were to offer me a print copy or an electronic copy of the same book, and my only task was to read and not to modify or to grade, I would much rather have the print copy. However, you're not going to give me any books, are you? You probably won't because they don't reproduce, so you can't give me one and keep a copy, and they probably weren't given to you. The best thing, and possibly the only good thing, about digital media of any sort is that much of it is free or at least cheaper.
          First, there are some inherent problems that may keep many of you from searching any plays online. One of the biggest problems for those of us who want to get everything free is that we will not (or at least should not) be able to find anything that is currently under copyright protection. That means that few scripts written in the twentieth century will be found. This doesn't seem so limiting until you realize that you're not going to find many translations for free because, if the play was recently translated, then the translator has (and should have) copyright protection. While finding copies of Greek tragedies poses only a few problems, finding French, Russian, or Spanish plays is a mighty problem (unless, of course you speak those languages) because the people who translated those scripts want to get paid.

Recommendation
          I have found and want to recommend a couple of places where you can go to get free and/or cheaper copies of plays. The first is NetLibrary, where you will have to fill out a short questionnaire to become a member, but you do not have to spend money once you're there (and the company is starting to discourage direct consumer business so it can perform business to business transactions). You will have to put up with some other annoyances, though. First, I have not found a keyword that will pull up plays only. I would like to have a list of all the plays in the library so I can choose among the ones that are there rather than having to guess what authors or titles might be there. You do have the option of going through the entire library in alphabetical order, but this is a big library, and Time's winged chariot may whisk you away before you get to the letter "m."

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