(no subject)
Google Books has opened up public domain books to be freely downloaded as PDFs, including stuff like Aesop's Fables, Dante's Inferno, and assorted plays by Shakespeare. Quality of the scans seems to vary (what the heck?), and the PDFs aren't searchable once you download them, but hey, they're free. I think they must be using some kind of automated book scanner that periodically botches scans. Flipping through the book I linked to, more than a third of the pages have substantial amounts of text blurred or missing, maybe as many as half. There's a lot of pages that simply come up as "image not found." After some cursory googling I found that Project Gutenburg has been offering public domain books for a long time, and have a nice browsable database of 19,000 classics in plain text; forget google.