How Can I read Free Classic Books at Google?

How Can I read Free Classic Books at Google?

From its earliest inception in the 1970’s, through to its current status today, one of the terms the Internet has always been known by is the Information Superhighway. With literally one touch of button – or, in the Internet’s case, one click of a mouse – you could have access to pretty much any fact or figure you wanted. Yet there’s more than just the latest news on the Internet – did you know there are complete books online, and thanks to the Google, these are free to read.

Not satisfied with being the most popular search engine for Internet users, Google is in the beta stage of a new service called Google Books, with its own Google Book Search allowing you to find the exact book you’re after. From classics to newer books, whole volumes of anthologies and more, Google Books lets you find that old out-of-print classic and read it online at your leisure. But is it really free, and how does it work?

Well, the god news is that, yes, it is free, and even better it’s extremely easy to use. Which, considering Google is behind it, shouldn’t really come as a surprise. All you need to do to get started is go to Google, and type in ‘books’ in the search engine. The first result should be a line that says ‘Google Book Search’. Click on that link, and you’ll be taken to the online Google library.

The screen that greets you shows you a glimpse of what books are available. Broken down into themes and sections, you can browse by the category that interests you, from classics such as ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’ by Mark Twain, to the likes of popular modern-day fiction writer James Patterson. Although the choice can’t quite hold up to a normal bookstore, there are still over 100,000 books online, and this number is growing everyday.

Once you’ve found the book that you’re interested in, you then have a set of choices, dependent on the book’s availability. Many of the books on Google Book Search are public-domain works, which means that they are no longer copyrighted. It’s this lack of copyright that allows these books to be digitised and uploaded for users of Google Book Search to read them free of charge.

You then simply click on the book you wish to read, and it’ll open in a new window, in a format similar to a PDF file. On certain books, you can even download a PDF file direct to your computer, so you can read the book later.

However, there are still some books and authors whose work is still protected by copyright. In this instance, you then have the option to read a preview of it, or buy it outright. There’s even a library feature, where Google Book Search is working with libraries countrywide to increase the numbers of books that have been scanned and uploaded to the servers where users can go to read the books.

There are still a few bugs to iron out – for instance, some books have made it into the Google Book Search database despite still being under copyright. Yet the software is still in the beta stage, and Google should have these small bugs ironed out before launch.

Author: Chuck Eglinton

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