On-line libraries

Electronic libraries have become very popular because of the spread of the Internet.

Новый Гутенберг

There are some famous book digitization projects that are the national heritage.

The library Million Book Project designed by Carnegie Mellon University posted on the Internet about 2 million books in 20 foreign languages.

One of the first electronic libraries Project Gutenberg was founded in 1971. Today it reckons about 20 thousand books.

Another non-commercial organization that aims to create a database of all books ever existing is Internet Archive (IA) with its project Open Library. All documents that can be found on the site are published on the base of the AGPL license. Today the project has posted on the Internet more than 1 million books.

The biggest on-line libraries in Russia

A t first it was just a hobby to collect electronic books in Russia. Later the number of books and their readers has increased.

Lib.ru is the first-most popular electronic library in Russia. It was founded in 1994 by Maxim Moshkov. It has more than 525 thousand books by 41104 authors. Every day more than 42 thousand people read magazine Самиздат that is a part of the library.

Альдебаран is one of the most popular electronic libraries in Russia. It has more than 71 thousand users per day. The library counts 50 thousand books by 11179 authors. You may read books either on the site or download them in rtf, fb2, isilo formats to Palm, an electronic reader .

Bookz.ru is the second-most popular electronic library in Russia. It has 56 thousand unique users per day. The library counts 59586 books by 14954 authors. In this library you may find not only fiction books but also dictionaries and reference books.

To read without reading

According to the statistics 10% of people read to the end of an electronic book; 40% of people leave it after reading only the first page. It is evident that people want first to learn some informayion about a book before buying its printed or electronic version. For this purpose different advisory services such as Imhonet were opened. It was founded in 2007; it has 22 thousand unique users per day.

You may also use Google Book Search provided by Google. Its English version started in 2004 and its Russian version was opened four years later in 2008. The service allows finding quotations in books, reading small extracts. At the same time it does not allow to download a book as a whole. However there is a trick: if you want to read a book very much you may print in the search engine the last phrase of the shown text page and then you may read the next page of the book. What is more, the service says where you can buy this book.

Yandex.Books provides only a book search by names and authors and links of shops where you can buy these books.

The library of Congress in a small suitcase

The library of Congress is the largest library in the world; it counts 138 million books and the general length of its book shelves is 850 km. The database of its digital version has 82,6 terabyte that can be put on 83 terabyte hard disks that, in its turn, can go into a small suitcase.