Thus far, the articles in this newsletter have primarily been focused on ebooks with often hefty pricetags. I hope that this article will bring attention to the many valuable ebooks that a library can offer its patrons without spending a dollar. Why would your library patrons want access to these primarily public domain ebook titles when the library has an edition of the work in paper? Here are a few reasons-- First, patrons can get access to the all of these texts from home, when a physical trip to the library is inconvenient. Second, once downloaded, full-text searching becomes possible, facilitating different types of research, such as Shakespeare's use of the color black throughout his tragedies. Still not convinced? Consider this-- The University of Virginia's Electronic Text Center's collection (see below) has had 5.8 million downloads between August 2000 and April 2002- that's 6.4 downloads per minute!

Project Gutenberg - begun in 1971 by Michael Hart at the University of Illinois, Project Gutenberg has grown into one of the largest collections of free ebooks. All of the works are public domain titles in ASCII format that generally fall into three categories: 1) "light literature" such as Alice in Wonderland and Aesop's Fables; 2) "heavy literature", including the Bible and the works of Shakespeare; and 3) "references" such as dictionaries, thesauri and almanacs. The collection exceeds 5,000 titles, which can be ftp'ed from the project's website (http://promo.net/pg/index.html) or from several mirrored ftp sites around the world. Because the ebooks are in ASCII format, they can be read using any text editor, such as Word, Notepad and WordPad. MARC records for most of the Project Gutenberg titles are in OCLC.

University of Virginia's Electronic Text Center has created a collection of 1,800 "publically-available e-books" in Microsoft Reader, Palm and HTML format. The collection includes "classic British and American fiction, major authors, children's literature, American history, Shakespeare, African-American documents, the Bible, and much more."

The University of Michigan's Making of America project contains over 8,500 books and 50,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints-- all free. The collection is made up of scanned images of the texts, but enhanced with optical character recognition to support full-text searching. Images of the texts can be viewed online and "uncorrected plain text" can be downloaded, viewed and searched via browser or word processor.

Indiana University Libraries' LETRS (Library Electronic Text Resource Service) began the Victorian Women Writers Project in 1995. The goal of the project is to "produce highly accurate transcriptions of works by British women writers of the 19th century, encoded using the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). " The collection consists of over 250 texts with many more in the works. MARC records with embedded URLs are available for the collection through OCLC.

The On-Line Books Page is a website founded and edited by John Mark Ockerbloom, a digital library planner and researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. Begun in 1993, the website in an index to texts freely available online. For inclusion in the index, the ebook must be:

• legitimately available at no charge
• the full text of a significant book in English
• and, in a stable, well-formatted text in a standard format

Included in the over 16,000+ listings are the full and partial archives of several serials, including The Atlantic Monthly and Harper's Magazine.

Similarly the IPL Online Texts Collection is an index of over 20,000 titles, made possible by the joint efforts of the Internet Public Library and the University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiatives. Texts can be searched and browsed by title, author and Dewey classification.

Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts is a "collection of public domain documents from American and English literature as well as Western philosophy. " The several hundred titles in the collection can be downloaded in PDF, Newton Paperback, Palm and Rocket eBook formats.

This is just the "tip of the iceberg." There are literally hundreds of thousands of free ebooks online. As I discovered while compiling this very short sample list, one discovery leads to many more. A good place to start is the Internet Public Library's index of "Other Online Text Collections." I think you will be amazed at how much you could enrich your library's collection without spending a single dollar of your acquisitions budget.