Read Books On-Line for FREE!

It’s going to take a couple of years and probably a few major court battles but Google and another organization called the Internet Archive is working to create a searchable internet databases of all the world’s books.  There have been other efforts along these lines such as the Gutenberg Project which currently offers 25,000 free online ebooks  and Lit2Go which comes from Florida's Educational Technology Clearinghouse.

The Google project can be found here:  http://books.google.com
They have already scanned thousands of books from major universities all across the nation.  You can search their database and read the books right off the screen like this:

As you might imagine this book scanning project has caused an eruption of copyright issues.  Currently you can only read selected pages from most of the books that are available.  The Google Book project might someday charge a small fee to read or download a book or it might eventually be free or a combination of for free and pay books.