Free Access to Online Books

If you're a fan of electronic books, or e-books, then this will interest you: two nonprofit groups, Project Gutenburg and World eBook Library, are going to provide free access to 300,000 books online. The e-books will be available for free for one month at the first World eBook Fair from the Fair's website. The free downloads begin on July 4, the 35th anniversary of Project Gutenberg's founding, through Aug. 4. Most of the Gutenberg books are typed and scanned into computers by thousands of volunteers and are titles that are not protected by copyright. Even more promising news is that Project Gutenberg founder Michael Hart says that plans are in the works to increase the number of free books available for each year's book fair. They would like to see 1 million books available for the annual fair's one-month run in 2009!