Online books and magazines can very useful for writers doing research. I wouldn’t recommend online books for pleasure reading, not unless you’re willing to print them onto paper, but having an electronic version of a book allows you to use the tools of word processing programs in your analysis. For example, how many times did Conan Doyle use the word "pellucid" in his writing? It’s an easy problem to solve if you have electronic copies of his novels and short stories.
What type of free books are online? The older it is the more likely it is to be posted. Copyright laws vary from nation to nation, but U. S. sites will normally contain copyright-expired works older than 75 years. 19th century works are therefore the most common, but you’ll also see the Greek and Latin classics, Shakespeare, Chaucer, the Bible (in many translations), and more.
Another advantage of online books is getting past that dreaded OOP (Out of Print) wall. I often see references to OOP books that I’d love to buy, but no publisher thinks it’s worth their money to print them. Using Conan Doyle as an example, we can always get the complete Sherlock Holmes in stores but he also wrote several historical novels that are very difficult to find. Print publishers may not want to invest the capital to make these books available, but the cost of posting them online is almost zero.
Why did I recommend printing your own copies for pleasure reading? The screen resolution of computer monitors is simply too fuzzy. Also, when we read we like to hold books much lower than computer screens are situated. Reading a novel online is simply too tiring on the eyes and body for most of us. There are some e-book gadgets available which have good screen resolution and permit you to download an electronic book and carry it around much like a paper one, but they’re still in the early stages of development and acceptance. There’s nothing wrong with them, it’s just a lot cheaper for you to print a paper version. Plus once you have an online book in your word processor you can change the font type, the font size, the number of columns, or whatever else you need to make it readable.
If you’re doing research on a book, you have a choice. You can download an entire book from the Web sites, or you can do all your reading and searching online. It’s probably faster to download books to your hard drive than working with them online. If the book is a plain text file, downloading consists of nothing more than selecting a storage folder. Some book files are zipped, that is, they are stored in a compressed format . These require a tool like WinZip or PKZip to uncompress them before you can see the contents. Some book files are in PDF (Portable Document Format), which means that you must first download and install the free Adobe Acrobat Reader to be able to read them. These are small inconveniences. The tools are either free or very cheap and require only a little time to install.
Here are a few book sites that are worth investigating.
As for free online magazines, there are hundreds of them. Some have no paper version at all. Quite a few well-known magazines produce two versions, one paper and one electronic. You may discover that a magazine that you subscribe to has articles on its Web site that are not in the paper version. Plus, magazine Web sites usually have useful links to related subjects.
Here are a few online magazine examples: