LIBRARY RESOURCES ONLINE FOR MANY REGIONAL AREASI've mentioned this before, but there is a treasure that many of us have at our fingertips without realizing it -- none of my friends knew we had the access I'm about to describe though we are all somewhat heavy readers.
One day, while looking for information on something, I wanted to access Infotrac which has articles going back to 1970s or so, in full text, for participant institutions like my city library. I live in California, and the requirement for accessing my library's special online resources is California residence. The Berkeley and San Francisco libraries both give its members access to databases that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive for most of us. And merely as a California resident, I am able to access both. (I didn't look for others.) Many of you will have similar access in your areas.
Infotrac is one of the offerings and a more common one.
http://www.berkeleypubliclibrary.org/services_and_resources/online_resources.php. I saw, on a web search, that many remote county libraries have the same access, so it's not just where a university might be.
Besides Infotrac, I clicked on one of the zillion links that came up on my screen, this time:
http://0-proquest.safaribooksonline.com.www.berkeley-public.org/home
This link will work only for people with a Berkeley Public Library card, even if California residence is all that's needed. A similar link should work with your own public library's link, which you can google. That'll depend on the state you're in.
Safari Books Online
To see, otherwise, what Safari Books Online is like, here's their own site. They have a 10-day free trial, but one can take a month at a time, at $23/mo. for access to 10 books per month (the Safari "Bookshelf" option rather than "Library" option. I have no affiliation with Safari Books Online. But at $23 for one month, access to 10 books (no limit on time spent online) is worth a look who need such books for their work.
The free library access version, if your library has it, is to almost all the current major computer/technical books that I've browsed at Barnes & Noble while lamenting I couldn't justify spending that much money, since I wanted to read so many of them.
Included in Safari Books Online are O'Reilly Media, Prentice Hall, Addison-Wesley, PeachPit Press, New Riders, Sams, que, Adobe Press, and many others.
It's all current -- books on items like Photoshop CS5, some on using Facebook :-) -- and so I tried it to see what the various e-books are like, to read on my desktop or netbook.
These offerings are FULL TEXT and in speedy online reading if you have fast Internet access. Every now and then a graphic image doesn't show up where it should but all the text is there.
I hope that most reading this will be able to find similar resources at their regional or state libraries.
Kindle 3's (UK: Kindle 3's), DX Graphite
Check often: Temporarily-free late-listed non-classics or recently published ones
Guide to finding Free Kindle books and Sources. Top 100 free bestsellers.
Also, UK customers should see the UK store's Top 100 free bestsellers.
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