Free Book Downloads from Google
Google is now offering free PDF downloads of many of the public domain books in the Google Book Search database. Danny Sullivan, the soon-to-be-departing editor of Search Engine Watch, has an excellent rundown of all of the features.
I spent some time playing around with the service this morning, and, as Danny points out, there are a few rules you have to adhere to. First of all, in order to find a book that's available in its entirety as a free download, you need to filter the search to only return "full view" books. When you go to the Google Books search page, the options of "All books" and "Full view books" appear as radio buttons underneath the search field. Click on "Full view books" before running your search.
Once you find a book you'd like to read, such as Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows or Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, go to the book's main page and look for the "Download" button. The book is yours to read, quote and use for non-commercial purposes. You'll also see links on each page to purchase an actual hard copy the book. One of my favorite applications of Google Book search is to search for specific phrases and quotes from famous books.
You'll find many classics and dusty, out of print texts in the Google Books database. This is because all of these books are in the public domain. As Philipp Lenssen notes in his Google Blogoscoped post, Google's usage guidelines for their book database includes several restrictions on how the books can be used. His question: Can Google legally restrict the way one uses works in the public domain? It has more to do with copyright law than it does with Google wanting or needing to keep you from reading a book, but the short answer is yes. Just like with the free ebooks you can download from Project Gutenberg, you can't download one of these PDFs from Google, reproduce it and sell it for profit.
If free books interest you, then you should also check out the non-profit Librivox project, which solicits, collects and hosts audio files of public domain books being read aloud. You can download the classics as MP3 or Ogg Vorbis files, either as a whole or by chapter.
Finally, another new feature from the Google Books team — a way to add a Google Book Search box to your site using a few lines of code.
