Alessandro Zanello

Perhaps not everyone knows that Google Books allows you to search the contents of large quantities of books. Google has in fact granted, after the suit brought by the association three years ago the authors of the U.S., with over 20,000 publishers and authors to make their books available. Of these books, you can browse through a few pages preview, just like in a library or a library. There are also links to libraries and bookstores where you can borrow or buy the book. Google is now known libraries partner with the intent to include their collections in Google Book Search. For Library Project books still under copyright, the results are like a card catalog, we show you info about the book and, usually, a few snippets of text showing your search term in context. For Library Project books no longer protected by copyright, however, you can read and download the full text.

This agreement will make many books out of print for preview, reading and purchase in the U.S.. Since resolves a lawsuit in the United States, has a direct effect only on those users who access Book Search in the U.S., in other places, the user experience on Google Book Search remains unchanged for now, but in future we will expected that these opportunities are extended to the whole world.

The ability to search within the books is one of the most useful: If you enter the keyword to search within the text, this will be highlighted in yellow and you will see previews of book pages and fragments in which the word appears. The reference to the page will make it easier to find the content sought.

Even the possibility of incorporating the book or parts thereof in your own blog or instant messaging service is quite interesting: just click on the icon at the top right and copy the link provided.

Looking for books in PDF or lit (for this second format using Microsoft Reader )? They come in all shapes and there are many works of famous authors.

The difficult thing is to find, however, since there are thousands of sites provided. Below the main Italian and foreign sites that let you download free ebooks:

SIT5 Site in Italian and offers various ebook download for PC and handhelds.

Free Ebook : And one of the largest sites of Italian ebook, ebook, there can also be found in English, French etc..

Mondadori : the site of Mondadori, which offers free download of the great classics.
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Scheduled for November 20, 2008 the launch of Europeana , the European Library project that will give digital access to the history of Europe, both in the form of images, texts, sounds and movies.

Users will have access to more than two million books, maps, recordings, photos, archival documents, paintings and films. They may come from more than 1,000 cultural institutions in all member countries of the EU, as the British Library in London, the Louvre in Paris and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

The state archives have made important national documents available, as the French Institut National de l'Audiovisual, which has provided 80.000 recordings of broadcasts of the 20th century, including shots of the battlefields of France in 1914.

The interface will be initially in French, English and German, with the intention of increasing the number of languages ​​after the launch.

The presence of the key icon in front of a WSJ article implies that this is only available to subscribers.

Pear ² If you install and activate the extension in Firefox User Agent, which allows you to bring up the Firefox browser as if it were another browser (Opera, IE, Safari, etc..) And register as a new agent generic Blackberry, for eg. with this string:

BlackBerry8300/4.2.2Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/107UP.Link/6.2.3.15.0

and then prepended at the article (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122710109269040789.html say it) the following prologue:

http://mobile2.wsj.com/device/article.php?mid=&CALL_URL =

obtaining a total of:

then you will see the mobile version, which is free (for now and lasts as long as you) even for non-subscribers.

To facilitate this, a registered bookmark this address, the entry "Read the WSJ article":

This is a bookmarklet, a nano-javascript application that takes the current address (must be on the "restricted", one for non-subscribers), and the prologue prepende said.

Basically we got a way to pretend to be a mobile phone and then read the free version of articles.