Classics on Google: Free Download

Wow! This is a royal treat and good news. At a time when Classics are just disappearing from students’ mindscape, Google is making available thousands of great old books free to read and download. “Just in time for the start of a new school year,” says The Boston Globe.

“For now, the Google Book Search service offers full downloads only of ‘public domain’ books, whose copyrights have expired. These include many of the most famous titles of all time, such as the writings of Dickens, Shakespeare, and Dante.

“It’s the latest milestone in Google’s campaign to do for books what it has done for websites. “Our goal is to create a comprehensive, full-text index of all the world’s books,” said Google Book Search group business product manager Adam Smith.

“But Google is also providing brief ‘snippets’ of copyrighted works by major publishers, outraging book publishers and authors who say the company has no right to reproduce them without permission.

“In addition to famous titles, Google Book Search features many obscure and forgotten books by long-dead novelists and scholars that it obtained through contracts with libraries at Harvard University, the University of Michigan, Stanford University, Oxford University, and the University of California. The New York Public Library is also participating in the project.”

Of course I would miss that musty smell of the classics bequeathed to me by my father and grandad and the feel of the pages that are so fragile!