Free Republic

The Online Books Page is a website that facilitates access to books that are freely readable over the Internet. It also aims to encourage the development of such online books, for the benefit and edification of all. The Online Books Page was founded, and is edited, by John Mark Ockerbloom, He is a digital library planner and researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. He is solely responsible for the content of the site. The site is hosted by the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, who provide the server, disk space, and network bandwidth for the site. They also employ the editor,...

I have found that a reliable way for me to choose authors is by word of mouth. That is, if people whom I share values, or people with whom I enjoy conversation, tell me about an author they like, I often find that I like that author as well. What is odd about this is that we often end up liking the author for completely different reasons from each other. Or, sometimes, after I read the author, I dislike much of what they say, but there is enough I do agree with that I am able to share those things...

Law librarian Rick Ramponi's collection of 3,000 regional cookbooks --including "Talk About Good" from the Lafayette, La., Junior League and "Shalom on the Range," which celebrates southwestern Jewish cuisine -- was manageable while he lived in a large house in Kalorama. But when he moved to a one-bedroom Dupont Circle apartment with a partner who collects large art and architecture books, Ramponi had to exile those cherished culinary texts to a pair of rented storage units several blocks away. Since 2002, he has spent more than $5,000 to keep them there, which "may be more than they are all worth,"...