Today is World Book Day http://www.worldbookday.com/

why not use SOSIG http://www.sosig.ac.uk to find some free full text books.

Here is my selection of some of the best online  LIbraries! For some links to other useful research resources try the sosig research tools collection at: http://www.sosig.ac.uk/roads/subject-listing/World-cat/restools.html


Gallica : La Bibliothèque Numérique 
Alternative Title: Gallica : la bibliotheque numerique
Description: The Gallica pages, part of the website of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, give access to a vast collection of digitised texts and images covering the periods from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century. Subjects covered include philosophy, law, economics and politics as well as history and literature. The Web site provides chronologies of the periods alongside thematic pages with links to related works. Alternatively, you can use the online catalogue to search for particular works, or by subject. A selection of dictionaries is also available as are a number of themed collections or dossiers and some audio resources. The Web site and most of the texts are in French, but there is also a selection of texts in other languages. Texts are provided in pdf format: you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to download them.  
Resource Type: Papers/Reports/Articles (collections)
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ 
eScholarship Editions
Description: Of particular interest to social scientists who study Africa, the Middle East or South Asia, eScholarhip Editions offers free access for the public to over eight hundred University of California Press titles in a huge range of subject areas including Anthropology, Business & Economics, History, Literature, Environmental Studies, Politics, Sociology and many more. You can search for titles, or browse by subject, author or title. You can view each title's bibliographical description and open the full text in a new window, section by section. The service is 'made available through a partnership between the UC Press and the California Digital Library's eScholarship program at the University of California' and is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. 
URL: http://texts.cdlib.org/escholarship/ 
Joseph Rowntree Book Shop
This online bookshop brings together reports from the JRF research programme published by the JRF and a range of specialist publishers. Covers areas relating to poverty, social exclusion.
http://www.jrf.org.uk/bookshop/
Marxist Writers Archive 
: offers access to the full text of the key Marxist and Socialist writings of the 19th and 20th centuries. All material is arranged in collections by author. Writers covered include the most famous authors such as Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, as well as less well known political theorists such as Labriola and Shachtman. The writings cover the full range of Marxist political theory including treatises on capitalism, socialism, communism, political economy and class struggle. The site also provides a series of links to non-English language resources which are of relevance to the study of Communism. 

URL: http://www.marxists.org/archive/index.htm 
Cornell University Library Historical Monographs 
Description: This site provides free access to a collection of over 400 online history books. The digitised images were created as part of a joint study involving Digital Preservation between Cornell University and the Xerox Corporation. They cover a wide range of subject areas from the humanities and social sciences and include out of copyright materials from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Key topics for social scientists include: political history, the history of the British Empire, the social history of women and economic history. They include some non-English language materials. The database may be browsed or searched by author/ title. 

URL: http://ebooks.library.cornell.edu:8099/cdl/index.html 
National Academies Press 
Description: This is the home page of the National Academies Press, the publishing house 'created by the [US] National Academies to publish the reports issued by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council'. The Web site gives free public access to over 3000 titles in a wide variety of subjects, including Education, Industry & Economics, Environmental Issues, Public Policy, Research Issues etc. You can browse by subject or search by keyword to find titles. To read a book online, select the link to the free online version, then choose a chapter. The chapter will be displayed one page at a time on the screen. Hard copy and PDF versions are available to buy for many titles. 
http://www.nap.edu/ 

If you've found a good site. why not suggest it for sosig (if its not there already)

Heather Dawson
Politics and Government editor
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