Forgotten Classics and Other Lesser Known Books (or No One Has Read this but Me!) discussion
Admin
>
Legitimate sources for free books on the web and beyond
date
newest »
newest »
If you have a public college in your city, check if they will let members of a community use their services. The little college here in Carson City will let me borrow three physical books at a time, and I can get ebooks from them, too. My son, who is actually attending the college, can have requests filled via InterLibrary Loan from other universities and colleges in the region, for example, from the University of Reno.
Works available at colleges, of course, tend to non-fiction and more serious literature. But I did find several old Newbery and Caldecott books there.
Not a book but I am reading The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary and started getting interested in that dictionary since I do a lot of reading of older classics and sometimes have trouble with those older words. I found out on the OED website that public libraries sometimes subscribe to the OED online. I turns out my library does so I am pretty excited right now. Thought I'd put that out there for anyone else who wants to be able to find more developed definitions as well. :)
Hey Luella, you got me hooked. Love a book all about WORDS! Just ordered a copy from Amazon. Thank you for the recommendation.
Susan wrote: "Hey Luella, you got me hooked. Love a book all about WORDS! Just ordered a copy from Amazon. Thank you for the recommendation."Nice :)
Luella wrote: "Not a book but I am reading The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary and started getting interested in that dictionary s..."I am incredibly fortunate to have whined and whined enough about the OED to have ended up with the "Compact Edition" in three volumes. By "compact," I mean it is completely unreadable without a magnifying glass that is supplied with that edition. These three volumes compress the information from the original ten-volume series, then edited to twelve volumes, and then revised with a supplement, etc.
Of course, English is the worst possible language upon which to publish a dictionary. It has approximately a million words (far more than any other language), and even with numerous updates over time, the OED is only up to about 600,000 words. Worse, English is like a sponge which incorporates lots of words from other languages.
EEK! sounds horrendous. I love words but not that much Jon. I'm sure we only use a fraction of those 6000,000 + and that's enough to last me a lifetime of reading and writing.
Forgotten Classics and Other Lesser Known Books...
Books mentioned in this topic
The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (other topics)The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (other topics)
My information is from the US; some is probably valid in other countries but I can't confirm.
Where can we find good free children's (or other) books legitimately?
Lots of places!
Indie and self-published authors often offer copies for review - see the promotional folder here in Children's Books, and see other groups on Goodreads. Beware quality, though, as of course these have not been vetted by a traditional publisher.
Project Gutenberg, Librivox, and The Public Domain Review offer older/ oop books, including classics. And the last offers movies, illustrations, etc. also.
The University of Pennsylvania has a Newbery-relevant collection:
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/wome...
and more at http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/...
Open Library, at https://openlibrary.org/, has some books that actually are *not* in the public domain, because they're only available for *loan,* just as at a real library.
Your local library probably has ebooks and digital audiobooks that you can read online or download to your device.
You can probably join other libraries besides your local one, and use their digital services, too.
For example, I live in Carson City, NV and have a card that gets me to CLAN, which serves almost all of rural NV. I also visited Reno and signed up for a card there, and have access to all the services that the locals do for all of Washoe County. Ditto Minden, to be a patron of Douglas County. In addition, my mother helped sign me up for a card at her library in Wisconsin, so I have full access to the MORE system, including the online downloads even when I'm not visiting her.
For physical books, see if there are any Little Free Libraries or BookCrossers in your area, just search their websites. I get a lot of real cheap ones at thrift stores, too (although Goodwill tends to overcharge).
For SF&F, try Baen and Tor online.