Amazon
Books
Order from over a million titles, write your review, and read others'. Fully searchable by author, title, and key words.
Atomic
Books
John Waters, director of such bizarro movie classics as Pink Flamingos and Hairspray, frequents this Baltimore shop in search of "insane books about every kind of extreme.". Now you can order the same oddities online.
Banned
Books Online
http://www.cs.cmu/Web/People/spok/banned-books.html
This exhibit of controversial books is presented by Carnegie Mellon University, where the administration recently removed more than 80 sex newsgroups, a matter still contested by the students. See which books have been banned out come under attack, and why, by reading the contentious extracts. Many titles are now considered classics.
Blackwells
This UK academic bookseller has one of the best-organised sites for browsing subject catalogues and ordering.
Cambridge
University Press
Online catalogue plus updates on the futured titles such as the Cambridge Encyclopaedia.
Coupland
Flies
http://www.interlog.com/~spiff/coupland
Douglas Coupland interviews and articles, as well as analyses of Microserfs, Generation X, Shampoo Planet, Life after God, and other writings. The perennial 20-something's own home page is at: http://www.coupland.com
Dillons
An excellent UK bookstore site, strong both general and academic books - and serious about its online presence.
Educational
Texts
Hundreds of thousands of words, ranging from the complete works of Shakespeare to the script of a lost episode of Star Trek. Plus links to similar archives of religious, political, legal, and fanzine text.
Eland
Books
This small specialist publisher has a model site, showcasing in elegant, unfussy layout its travel narratives, with wellchosen excerpts from each, and a full ordering facility.
Elsevier
Science
Elsevier claims to be the world's leading supplier of scientific information. On board is an exhaustive list of journals, publications, and multimedia productions, plus news of forthcoming releases, reviews, and ordering facilities.
Future
Fantasy Bookstore
Palo Alto's Future Fantasy Bookstore specialises in fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery books. You can search through its online library and, if anything takes you fancy, order it by email.
The
Internet Public Library
Links to thousands of online books, magazines, and newspapers.
Kaiser
Books
If you're after books and magazines, on or off the Net, you'll find a way to get them from here. If not in the book and links, or from a shop in the world-wide second-hand bookstore directory.
Laissez-Faire
Books
Laissez-Faire has been a source of librarian books and tapes for over twenty years. It offers titles by the likes of Ayn Rand, Thomas Jefferson, Ludwig von Mises, P.J. O'Rourke, Milton Friedman, Thomas Szasz and of course, Adam Smith, on topics like education and humour. You can email order from anywhere in the world.
Literary
Kicks
http://www.charm.net/~brooklyn/LitKicks.html
This shrine to the beats has a mass of fine material, audio, clips and links on the likes of Kerouac, Corso, Ginsberg and Cassady, and all who came into their orbit.
Loompanics
gopher://gopher.well.sf.ca.us/OO/Business/catalog.asc
It's best to save this long, single-page catalogue as a text file, and read it offline. It's crammed with reviews and ordering details of subversive, strange, and sometimes downright nasty gems of anarchic and alternative writing.
Macmillan
USA
The Macmillan USA Information SuperLibrary goes further than most publishers, putting searchable contents pages and full chapter samples for many or its thousands of books online. What's more, you can download copies of any software included with computer titles, here or from its FTP site. It's a massive site.
Online
Books
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/Web/books.html
There are complete text tucked away in obscure archives all over the Net. Here's an index of about a thousand titles well as links to almost 100 specialist repositories.
Outpost:Culture
http://www.lb.com:80/~outpost/
Another book/bookstore/publisher finder, this time from US small press distributor, Inland Book Company.
Penguin
Books
Penguin maintains Web sites for both US and UK companies, and they're introducing some neat features, including preview chapters of novels, and even a specially created hypertext novel. Worth watching.
Poetry
Society
http://www.bbcnc.org.uk/online/poetry/
UK halfway house for budding poets and their victims.
Project
Guntenburg
http://jg.cso.uiuc.edu/PG/welcome.html
Fifty years after authors die, their copyrights pass into the public domain. With this in mind, Project Guntenburg is dedicated to making as many works as possible available online in plain vanilla ASCII text. Not all the books are old, however - some, such as the computer texts, have been donated. As great as that sounds, in practice you might prefer the convenience of the hard copy.
Pure
Fiction
For pulp worms and writers alike. Packed with book previews, author interviews, and hundreds of links to the sort of stuff you need to get of the ground and punch out your first best seller. See also alt.books.purefiction
Thomas
Pynchon Home Page
http://www.pomona.edu/pynchon/
The reclusive author is ideal for the Net and this is a wittily constructed site- courtesy San Narciso Community College, of course - with complete text of Pynchon esoterica, such as letters, articles, publishing blurbs, and the more obscure short stories.
Romance
Novel Database
http://www.sils.umich.edu/~sooty/romance/romance.html
Romantic fiction catalogued and rated, plus links to authors' pages and similar sites
Shakespeare
http://the-tech.mit.edu/Shakespeare
The Bard's complete works online.
Sun Tzu's
The Art of War
http://www.cnu.edu/~patrick/taoism/suntzu/suntzu.html
Discover Sun Tzu's "The Art of War," with it without a guide. At 2400 years old, it's believed to be the world's oldest military treatise. Like other Chinese Wisdoms such as the teachings of Confuctius, much of it still rings true and its adages can be applied to any conflict. So much so, that it became the Yuppies' surrogate bible. Oh well, battles do have their casualties.
Tech
Classics Archive
http://the-tech.mit.edu/Classics
Searchable archive of hundreds of translated Greek and Roman classics.
Ventana
Order online from Ventana's range of popular computer texts, to download programs from its companion disks. The Internet section carries full text of Net selections, including Walking the WWW, Official Netscape Navigator 2.0, Internet Business 500, and Internet Roadside Attractions, complete with thousands of Web site reviews.
Wyvern
Business Bookshop
http://www.cityscape.co.uk/users/ab95/
Buy direct from Wyvern's online business book catalogue.
