You can read books and novels on your book readers. Of course, it's easier to read a paper book, but book readers have their advantages: you can carry twenty or thirty novels in your book reader, it always remembers what page you were at, and you can read anytime, anywhere.
200,000 Books and eText...
There are perhaps 200,000 etexts on the net: books, documents, maps, etc. Some of the following collections have links to more collections.
Don't ignore ASCII format. It has been around for thirty years, and it's certain that we will use ASCII twenty years from now, whereas it's also certain that whatever book reader format we use today, it will be obsolete in a few years. So if you're creating a worthwhile document, save it in both PDA and ASCII format, and make it available in both.
The following are in no particular order. If you find a broken link, please let me know by adding a comment below.
- Project Gutenberg. 40,000 etexts in ASCII at Gutenberg.org. Project Gutenberg started the first collection of etexts.
- Carnegie-Mellon. 29,000 etexts at english-www.hss.cmu.edu.
- Humanities Text Initiative (HTI). University of Michigan. An umbrella organization for the creation, delivery, and maintenance of electronic texts. HTML, in a single file. hti.umich.edu/. List of etexts at hti.umich.edu/english/pd-modeng/bibl.html.
- Online Books Page at University of Pennsylvania. 20,000 etexts. Various formats, incl. links to other e-libraries, incl. Gutenberg. http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/. The Archives has links to many collections, incl. many languages. digital.library.upenn.edu/books/archives.html.
- Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts. American literature, English literature, and Western philosophy. 133 authors and 1,000 etexts. ASCII. Automatically creates a Palm prc file. sunsite.berkeley.edu/alex/.
- Perseus Project at Tufts University. perseus.tufts.edu/. Digital library of the ancient world, with texts in Greek, Latin, heiroglyphics, plus other languages.
- Bibliomania. 2,000 etexts. HTML, in separate chapters. bibliomania.com/.
- NetLibrary. 4,000 etexts. For reading on PCs (not PDAs.) Cumbersome checkout procedure, plus user registration, etc. legacy.netlibrary.com.
- Bartleby.com. HTML. Sells etexts. Copy and convert to ASCII. Bartleby.com.
- Internet Public Library (IPL) 20,000 etexts. SMGL, many chapters. Easy to convert to ASCII. Strip out the SMGL.
- gopher://wiretap.area.com/11/Books
- Free-Ebooks.net
- EbookDirectory.com
- University of Virginia's collection at etext.lib.virginia.edu/ebooks/
- ebooknet.com: For more about etexts and so on.