I knew that would get your attention.
Internet Archive, a site I use regularly for researching public domain books, just announced their newest project: OpenLibrary.org. Here’s the site’s description:
One web page for every book ever published. It’s a lofty, but achievable, goal.
To build it, we need hundreds of millions of book records, a brand new database infrastructure for handling huge amounts of dynamic information, a wiki interface, multi-language support, and people who are willing to contribute their time, effort, and book data.
To date, we have gathered about 30 million records (20 million are available through the site now), and more are on the way. We have built the database infrastructure and the wiki interface, and you can search millions of book records, narrow results by facet, and search across the full text of 1 million scanned books.
According to the homepage, the current numbers are 22,845,290 book entries and 1,064,822 books with full text.
I’m impressed by the site, and I look forward to seeing how it does. The good news for Zotero users like me is that it does appear to have decent (though not perfect) Zotero support, allowing you to grab and import lots of books at a time.
Other online book sites you might find useful include:
- Google Books
- Amazon
- Live Books (content still available at Archive.org)
- Post Reformation Digital Library
- Books.Logos.com (currently in beta and free)
- CCEL
- SeminaryLibrary.com (not free)
- Dallas Theological Seminary Rare Books
- Princeton Theological Seminary Digital Library
- Scribd (I’m not very impressed. It has a poor selection and crashes Firefox 3.1 constantly!)
- Project Gutenberg
- Forgotten Books
Other helpful book sites that don’t have text available include:
What are your favorite sites for researching books?
Chris Dattilo says
What a wonderful collection. Thanks for putting this all together. I hope someday all this can be downloaded to the Kindle. Reading on a computer screen is the only problem.
Imagine if all this could be downloaded, annotated, clipped and saved in snippets.
Thanks for a great post.
Maria says
Thanks for all these links. Goodreads.com is also a good book site with some e-books added.
Corbinian says
Have you checked out mendeley? I use it all the time, it organises all your pdfs, is a bibliography manager, sorts out all the meta-data and also hosts a researcher network where you can collaborate with other researchers.
http://www.mendeley.com
Phil Gons says
I have not. Thanks for the tip. Any idea how it compares to a tool like Zotero?