Google to Offer Free Novels
Google is planning to offer Google Book Search users the ability to download and print selected classic out of copyright novels as PDF files for free. Google's CEO Eric Schmidt says he believes that this project will introduce many people to books that they would never have normally discovered. The free novel program started life as Google's giant initiative to put books online in a searchable format. Through an outside project known as Gutenberg, volunteers have been scanning public domain books for many years to text files that can in turn be used for printing or reading. Google is acquiring this information, and will allow users to access these books in a print ready format.
UPDATE: To find out-of-copyright books that you can download, select the "Full view" radio button when you search on books.google.com
Current available titles include:
- Ferriar's The Bibliomania
- A futurist from 1881's 1931: A Glance at the Twentieth Century
- Aesop's Fables
- Shakespeare's Hamlet
- Abbott's Flatland
- Hugo's Marion De Lorme
- Dunant's Eine Erinnerung an Solferino
- Bolívar's Proclamas
- Dante's Inferno
