Free Electronic Books and Encyclopedia

Undergraduate students are shelling out more and more money for textbooks these days, and since they are required to buy certain books, it is almost as if they are guaranteed to get ripped off. I propose a partial solution.

Don’t buy the books.

This doesn’t mean don’t read the books, and it doesn’t even mean that you can’t have your own copy on to underline, highlight, and doodle about romance in the margins.

Download the books.

If you’re taking a literature class, the odds are good that you are reading an old book, and after awhile old books enter the “public domain” so that their texts can be freely distributed. That’s why Project Gutenberg is such a wonderful thing.

The Project Gutenberg Philosophy

The Project Gutenberg Philosophy is to make information; books and other materials available to the general public in forms a vast majority of the computers, programs and people can easily read, use, quote, and search.

This has several ramifications: 1. The Project Gutenberg E-texts should cost so little that no one will really care how much they cost. They should be a general size that fits on the standard media of the time …

2. The Project Gutenberg E-texts should so easily used that no one should ever have to care about how to use, read, quote and search them …

While I’m on the subject of free information, I should also mention the indispensable Wikipedia. Basically, Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia, which describes itself this way:

In addition to typical encyclopedia entries, Wikipedia includes information more often associated with almanacs, gazetteers, and specialist magazines, as well as coverage of current events.
The open editing process had led to Wikipedia becoming the world’s largest encyclopedia in less than four years of operation, with 450,000 articles and 77 million words in the English edition, and over 1.3 million articles in all language editions combined (as of January 2005).

And best of all, its free. So you can add these two tools, along with Google Scholar, to your growing arsenal for research and study