www.scribd.com You really should just check it out for yourself, but i will give you a few tips to ease the learning curve.

This is not an advertisement, but I might sound like one because how much I love scribd.com. So, what is scribd.com? In their words, it is: " the largest social publishing company in the world."

Translation: lots of books on lots of topics, free to upload and download. The catch of course is that you need a membership to upload/download, but you do not need a membership to view the documents. (You will need Flash, but just for the viewer, you can still download without it).

I'm not gonna go into the fine details, but it's basically like youtube and facebook combined, but for books, complete with tags, feeds and subscriptions. If someone publishes (what they call uploading) something you like, but the small sidebar doesn't have anything else you really want, do realize that the sidebar is only a small sample of all their files. I found one member that had over 600 files, many of which I downloaded, but the site only shows you a few items in the sidebar (click the username in the top right corner to get access to all their public files) If you subscribe to them, you will see when they add more material, and also their comments, with links to the document they were commenting on, which is cool, because this can help you find more interesting publishers.

My username on there is reblcommander, www.scribd.com/reblcommander I don't have anything up there, but if you go to my page you can see all the people I subscribe to. I was doing research on drawing and comics for a while, so some of the subscriptions will be for that, and a few of them are to people I think are full of crap, and their personal postings, because it is still interesting even if I don't believe it. But enough of them are to people that have books pertinent to the occult in general, such as grimoires, mysticism, folklore and history. Anyway, it's not a bad place to start. One user that many of you should find something you like is aciel, www.scribd.com/aciel

As for downloading, again, you need to have a membership, and most books are offered in .pdf. or .txt format, though some people don't ley you download at all, an others are only previews of paid books. There is a download limit, but it is pretty high, though apparently it depends on your location and activity level, I only hit a limit after downloading a ton of books, and then I just had to wait till the next day, and I could still read the books online and add them to my reading list.

Also note that a fair amount of the old books are ports from google, which means that they are direct scans of books, not searchable text. Some of them are fairly readable, others not so much. But, if you go to google books www.books.google.com you will have the option to download the book in EPUB format, which instead of having pictures of the pages actually spits out text that you can search, copy, paste, etc. This requires an EPUB reader, just search and you can find some for your platform for free. I use Stanza www.lexcycle.com/stanza, though it sometimes is a little buggy, it usually works fine, it's free and works on Windows XP/Vista Max OS X and iPhone. The Desktop version is still in Beta, so it has problems with PDF files sometimes, but it does great with EPUB.

As for a download limit, google starts making you fill in 2 different CAPTCHA boxes after not too many downloads, so I stick to scribd, only checking google for an EPUB if I can't find a formatted text version of a book.

Hope this helps, and of course if any of you are on scribd I would love to see what you might have to share. Again I am at www.scribd.com/reblcommander.

Goodnight