Google Books

GOOGLE BOOKS

Google made a big announcement a while back about digitising every book on the planet, or thereabouts. People fretted about copyright, about Google monopolising the world's knowledge (as if it doesn't already - ask any journalist researching a story) but Google pressed on anyway, pointing out that it could pretty much do what it likes with out of copyright material, which is true ... www.victorianlondon.org works on the same principle, albeit on a smaller scale! The 'beta' version is available online http://books.google.com/advanced_book_search ... click "Full view books" if you want to limit your search to full text items. It's basically a massive hodge-podge of material, but includes some very obscure Victorian novels etc. which, frankly, would never otherwise appear online. Ironically, at the moment at least, some great Victorian material, utterly out of copyright, is searchable on the database, but not viewable in full text ... perhaps they'll fix that ... fingers crossed!