Monday, January 18, 2010

Where to Look on the Internet For Works of Fiction?

Thousands of books are published each year, with most of the books being published in English. It is practically impossible for a person to store and read all the books that are published. However, public libraries provide a way for books to be stored. The largest library in the world is the US Library of Congress that is a repository for millions of books, recordings, manuscripts and maps. It also has an online catalog that can be used for searching the books housed in the library. Other places like universities have specialized libraries.
However, there could be an instance where a person does not live near a library and still wants to read a particular book, or the local library does not have the book the person is looking for. Fortunately, the Internet has provided a way in both the instances.
The Internet Public Library has many links to online resources. This is a library founded by the University of Michigan School of Information, and offers a wide range of topics.
When you check online resources, you will find that most of the online books are classics. Majority of these classics are no longer under the protection of copyrights law and thus, can be made available on the public domain. You can find these classics online in The Harvard Classics and Shelf of Fiction, which can be accessed through Bartleby's website. This collection was started by Harvard in 1909. You can access classics from Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson and many other authors and writers.
Similarly, you can access Bibliomania website that has over 2,000 classics, or you can check out Online Book Page, a website run by University of Pennsylvania that has over 25,000 online books for free reading.
Many of the online libraries also offer dictionaries, thesauruses, religious books besides classics. You can also purchase books from many of the websites listed above. All this has been made possible by the Internet, which now allows us to conduct research on basically anything under the sky.

No comments:

Post a Comment