Free Digital Libraries, part 1
This is the most well known of the digital libraries. It contains over 20,000 books in numerous languages (though predominantly in English) in the public domain. The database is catalogued like any library and easy to search by author, title or subject. You can even search the full text. The database doesn’t only contain novels but also essays, audio books, etc.
Also to help your search, the list the Top 100 books as well as recently added books. They also have a new feature called “bookmark”, it allows you to mark where you last stopped reading online.
Most of their ebook are in html, pdfor plain text which I personally find hard on the eyes in the long run. I do however like that they also make Plucker files which is a program you can install on your pocket PC. The latter is much more in fitting with my reading habits and thus appreciated. I plan to test the program on my way to school today to see if it really does enhance the reading experience.
This must be a brilliant resource… if you go to the University of Virginia. I was getting increasingly annoyed with every “UVA Only” I saw in bright red next to this text or other that I wanted to read. Still they have a wonderful selection. They have texts in old, middle and modern English, in German, French, Latin and on separate sites, Chinese, Japanese and Apache (all three of which are fully accessible in original languages and translation). They have poetry, plays, and prose, fiction and non-fiction. And to be fair, while most of their texts are not freely available to people outside of UVA, there are still numerous texts that are, including nearly 10,000 titles from the Modern English collection (many of which are now available as ebooks). It’s definitely worth a look.
This is a project by Harvard and McGill to aims to make pre-modern Chinese writings by women available outside of rare book libraries. They currently offer 90 titles in Chinese which can be searched by author (including her name, ethnicity and marital status), title, book it’s contained within, genre, period, poetic form, geographic location… and I could go on. The site offers scans of the volumes in question; this can be occasionally difficult to read depending on the condition of the original document. Nevertheless this site is wonderful for anyone studying pre-modern Chinese.
The Women’s Writers Project is an initiative by Brown University to make the writings of women more available. It is not free but I felt the need to bring it up because it truly is a wonderful resource. It contains the works of many important female writers (of both fiction and non-fiction) from 1400 to 1850, which may be difficult to find elsewhere. You can order printouts of the works from their database and many Universities (including McGill) do have access to it, so if you have the opportunity, I suggest checking it out.
I haven’t even put a dent in the numerous digital libraries available. I’ll have more in my next post but I you should have more than enough to keep you occupied until then. ^_^
