When I get a little money I buy books...

reposted from: http://www.cafepress.com/heathenharlots.113289757

what should i read next.com

Enter a book you like and the site will analyse our database of real readers'
favourite books (over 32,000 and growing) to suggest what you could read next.

Rare Book Room

The "Rare Book Room" site has been constructed as an educational site intended to allow the visitor to examine and read some of the great books of the world.

Over the last ten years, a company called "Octavo" embarked on digitally photographing some of the world ’s great books from some of the greatest libraries. These books were photographed at very high resolution (in some cases at over 200 megabytes per page).

This site contains all of the books (about 400) that have been digitized to date. These range over a wide variety of topics and rarity. The books are presented so that the viewer can examine all the pages in medium to medium-high resolution.

In particular the site contains:

1. Some of the great books in science, including books by Galileo, Newton, Copernicus, Kepler, Einstein, Darwin and others.

2. Most of the Shakespeare Quartos from the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the University of Edinburgh Library, and the National Library of Scotland. It also contains the First Folio from the Folger Shakespeare Library.

3. The complete copies of Poor Richard ’s Almanac by Benjaman Franklin.

4. Very rare editions: Gutenberg ’s Bible of 1455 (from the Library of Congress), Harvey's book on the circulation of blood, Galileo ’s Siderius Nuncius, the first printing of the Bill of Rights, and the Magna Carta.

Don't feel guilty if you don't read a book from cover to cover

Nigel Warburton recommends buying loads of books:-

• but don't feel guilty if you don't read books cover to cover. Pick out the best bits. "I usually skim, dip, and focus on small sections. Then I come back to it perhaps years later, and often find something different."
• Buying books of living authors motivates them to write more (profit motive)
• Buy books by dead authors from charity shops (promotes charity) or borrow from the library (reduces deforestation)