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Originally Posted by khalleron
Old books? Google Books has 2 million PD books in epub format.
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To be fair, most of those are atrocious as epubs. Auto-OCR'd with no formatting corrections. However, the scans are there and able to be converted into decent ebooks by anyone who's interested; a library could dedicate a few hours a week to conversion ("community activity: free workshop on learning to make an ebook!") and gradually build themselves an extensive collection to enhance what's available from Gutenberg.
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What there aren't enough of, I will admit, is backlist books - those that are still in copyright but have fallen out of print.
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And there's not decent archiving of the ones they do have; for all that Google is the master of websearches, their own ebook searches suck. Their metadata's haphazard and flawed and their browsing is atrocious. They've got 2m books (probably allowing for a number of duplicates, but at that quantity, who cares), but you can't find them unless you know specifically what you're looking for.
Sorry. I do agree with you--there's no shortage of available ebooks; there's a shortage of specific categories--like the majority published between 1930 and 1995 or so. But there's more than a lifetime's worth of good reading freely available.