All of the Internet Archive's ebooks can be more efficiently found at OpenLibrary.org. That is an Internet Archive project and its stated goal is to establish a web page for every book that has ever been published. It is mainly a catalog and most pages will only contain bibliographic data, but there are also a large number of ebooks available that they have scanned. They have all the Project Gutenberg books and those are public domain and can be downloaded by anyone. This does not mean that you should give up Project Gutenberg, though, because they do not have Gutenberg's public domain magazines. Open Library does have a lot of books that are in copyright that can be downloaded too. There is no need to register or to provide proof of disability because the books can only be read on a device with an NLS key. They just assume that if you have such a key then you must be qualified. To find these books, go to the site and enter the search phrase "accessible book." Be sure to use the quotation marks because if you don't you will get books that just have those two words somewhere on their catalog pages. You will get several million results returned and most of them are not in English. The first page of results will consist of 100 titles. Go to the bottom of that page and you will find any number of possible refinements for your search. One of them will be English. If you refine your search to English you should get over 600,000 results. You can keep going to the bottom of the result pages to further refine your results or you may enter search terms in addition to "accessible book" to find what you are looking for. Once you download and start reading a book you will find that these accessible books are raw scans and could really use the services of Bookshare volunteers to be proofread. They are not awful scans though. I have yet to download an Open Library book that was unreadable. I can't say the same about Bookshare fair quality books. Nevertheless, Open Library has a lot more books in accessible format than Bookshare does and the collection is growing. Just last night there was a feature on, I think it was CBS news about the Internet Archive. They were interviewing the man who is behind it. He has a warehouse in the San Francisco area in which he is trying to collect at least one physical copy of every book ever published. He receives donations from libraries when they discard books. Every book he gets is scanned and added to the Internet Archive and so to Open Library too. Collecting every book that has ever been published has to be a really long term project, but it is impressive to see how much progress has been made.
On 4/15/2012 4:44 AM, John J. Boyer wrote:
You may have heard of this organization. I went to their website, http://www.archive.org , but I couldn't tell if they provided usa ble e-books. Fromm what I have heard, they scan books and keep an immage of each page. I don't knnow if these images can be used for OCR. There is also the matter off copyright. I don't think they can provide books except those in the public domain. I've been asked about them, so any information would be appreciated. John
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