Google books is one way to go, but not the only one, and it won’t necessarily refer you to these other digitized books projects. Your best bet for sorting them out is WorldCat.
Google books books.google.com/
Hathitrust Digital Library www.hathitrust.org/
Project Gutenberg www.gutenberg.org/
Internet Archive www.archive.org/
by Peter Suber
Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder.
OA is entirely compatible with peer review, and all the major OA initiatives for scientific and scholarly literature insist on its importance. Just as authors of journal articles donate their labor, so do most journal editors and referees participating in peer review.
OA literature is not free to produce, even if it is less expensive to produce than conventionally published literature. The question is not whether scholarly literature can be made costless, but whether there are better ways to pay the bills than by charging readers and creating access barriers. Business models for paying the bills depend on how OA is delivered.
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