Canadian Books Online (National Institute)

Internet Access to Books
In this day of finding almost anything on the Internet, it should be no surprise that books can also be accessed that way. The following is not intended to be exhaustive of the sites that provide digitized books on the Internet but merely examples of such sites.

Google Books
Google Books is a search engine dedicated to the content of books and periodicals. Depending on the copyright status of the book, the entire book may be available for reading or downloading, or a number of pages are available in the “preview” format, or only a few lines are readable in the “snippet” format. In some cases, only the title, author and other identifying information is revealed; none of the book is displayed online. The goal of Google Books is to help you discover books on the topic you search and assist you by displaying those out of copyright or for which copyright permission has been obtained; to identify a website where you may buy them; or assist in finding a copy at a local library.

Since the initial project began in 2004, new partners have been continually secured to increase the number of books digitized. As of April 2013, the number of scanned books was over 30 million, but the scanning process has since slowed down. There have been several lawsuits over copyright alleged infringements and this may have impacted the digitization project.

Internet Archive
Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library which digitizes over 1000 books a day and now includes over 84,000 genealogy items. You can view the book images on your computer’s screen or download the files in PDF format, EPUB format (used on many ebook readers, including iPad and Android tablets), Kindle format, among others. Resources include, among many things, books on surname origins, vital statistics, parish records, census records, passenger lists of vessels, and other historical and biographical documents. More than 3-million users access this site daily. What a wonderful way to have an extensive genealogy library at your fingertips without having to find shelf space in your home for the books.

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Information in this Wiki page is excerpted from the online courses offered by The National Institute for Genealogical Studies. To learn more about these courses or other courses available from the Institute, see our website. We can be contacted at [mailto:wiki@genealogicalstudies.com wiki@genealogicalstudies.com]

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