Do you know about Google Books?

[swords]

I'm probably behind the times but I just discovered Google Books which has huge previews (sometimes the entire book online) much nicer than Amazon's 5 page previews. I just stumbled upon this other day, so here's a link to a general search on Carnivorous Plants:
http://books.google.com/books?ct=result&q=carnivorous+plants&lr=&sa=N&start=0

Anything that says limited preview can be viewed online, free. Which is wonderful since some books are simply missing the back cover or index, all the most important info is still there. It seems to return pretty good results with lots of reading material for almost any book / author / topic search.

Here's another couple online book places which has all full books, plenty to read if you have varied interests:
http://www.forgottenbooks.org/
http://www.scribd.com/

Hopefully this isn't old news for everybody since I just found out about it myself. Enjoy!

 

[rattler]

yeah ran across it awhile back but was under the impression it only had books whose copyrights had expired so i had only looked for old hunting books by Teddy Roosevelt, Samuel Baker, Courtney Selous and those types........i guess i was wrong.....

 

[herenorthere]

Google can show copyright-expired books for free and I think it plans to bankroll the effort (and make its profit) by charging for access to those with active copyrights or by linking people to the copyright-holder's site.