Google's Cool Free Book Downloads

Google's project to scan the world's books may be far from universally beloved, but I can't imagine any serious book lover not being tickled by its latest feature: free PDF downloads of classic public-domain books, via the Google Book Search site.

It's not clear how vast this downloadable library is--Google's blog entry announcing it just says there are "many" books--but I've been having fun finding, grabbing, and perusing books from it. The wonderful Project Gutenberg has offered downloadable public-domain books for years, but Google's e-books are something different, since the PDFs are of actual copies of specific volumes from the libraries Google works with.

These are, literally, books with a history--they've got everything that gives real library books personality except that musty smell. How they look, in other words, is as interesting as how they read.

For instance, the copy of Lewis Carroll's Through The Looking Glass I downloaded has an oddball cover in which Alice has short hair and seems to be in the midst of being threatened by a Brittany Spaniel; is from the University of Michigan collection and appears to have been once owned by a Marjorie M. Miller; and has both the classic Tenniel illustrations and a frontispiece by some anonymous hand:









I'm not sure if I'd sit down and read an entire book in PDF form--it's not a great experience in the best of scenarios, and the books I've downloaded are good-but-not-great in image quality, as if Google is compressing them to conserve disk space on whatever server farm its scanned volumes live on. But I could imagine myself reading short stories, or bits and pieces of longer works, this way. And I bet I'll return frequently to at least browse the virtual stacks...