Gardening books and magazines at the Internet Archive

Not sure where to put this, perhaps in Freebies, but it is an online free library, so even there would perhaps feel out of place..

Anyway, I discovered that the Internet Archive as a massive collection of gardening magazines and books, ranging for very old ones to kind of recent publications (2009 or perhaps even later).




Internet Archive Search: gardening

Some of these are under copyright, so they require readers to create a free account and "borrow" the book or magazine for an hour while reading it.
It sounds weird but I think it allows them to offer for free access to the more recent material.
I think that the older texts can be read with no account, that is normally the case for the archive.

 

Aldo, my friend. I don't know, but couldn't one download such books oto some Kindle or whatever. Just a thought.

 

I am not familiar with the file format used by kindle, so I am not entirely sure.
It would seem that those books which requires no registration, such as this quite fascinating "Subtropical vegetable-gardening" from 1916
Subtropical vegetable-gardening : Rolfs, Peter Henry, 1865- : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
do have download links for 20 file formats or so, including EPUB and PDF.

Those requiring registration should allow donwload in PDF and again EPUB only, so suitable to read on a tablet, phone or computer.
In general, they allow to download for free a special format compatible with software for visually impaired readers, which is nice of them.

Often I just read them on their site though, with a large enough monitor it is quite feasible.

 

I love books. In fact, I am planning making more book shelves. As I often say. The internet is great for quick referencing, but there is something special to me, actually being able to select the printed book. Some of my books, I have paid £80+ for. For our gardening friends. There are lots of good books S/H on ebay etc. I also like reading some of the CD's that have been produced of collections of old books on gardening and allied subjects.

 

Hi Mike, I love books too, but they do take up a considerable amount of space. Then, our house is very tiny and crammed. So nowadays I buy way less books than I used to. Actually, I often found myself buying in print books which I first read digitally and liked.
I think it is fair to the authors, even if nowadays they might make more money from the digital copies, it is a bit said how little money they make anyway.
Recently I bought in print an essay about solfege in the galant era, which might sound boring but is actually very fascinating and useful to the modern musician, given the author spent so much effort researching it and also it is easier to practise music from paper.
But then it turns out he was also giving the applied parts for free online, because he said that anyway his shares per sold copy was a pittance (or perhaps he is just a nice guy who likes to help out musicians, but I think author shares are indeed quite low).