Project Gutenberg

Last week I wrote about JSTOR, a phenominal academic article resource on the web. Today I'd like to talk a bit about another electronic resources for bookworms: online libraries like Project Gutenberg and Questia.

Project Gutenberg started in 1971, well before the "internet age" hit and became widespread. Over the years, Project Gutenberg has strived towards its goal of making information and literary texts easily available for free to anyone around the world with an internet connection.

Though you may not want to read entire books on your computer (unlike Amazon's Kindle, your computer screen will make your eyes hurt after too many pages of text), this is a terrific resource for reminding yourself of an important passage from a classic book, doing a bit of research, or starting a book to decide if you want to purchase it.

Questia is, in many ways, a similar resource. Unlike Project Gutenberg, Questia is not free; to access their entire library, a subscription is $19.95/month. To subscribe ONLY to the Literature Library, a monthly subscription is $9,95.

For people who live in remote areas with limited local library resources, this can be a good deal. It is also convenient for people who do everything electronically. Questia has a wide scope of material. If you want to see what they have, you can search their libraries and read selections without subscibing.

There are many more resources out there, but these are just two that have helped me research over the years. Neither of these websites are especially slick or up-to-date looking, but if the text is readable, that's all you really need.