www.forgottenbooks.org
Forgotten Books has a goal of keeping old books in print. They do so by offering their books in three formats: low quality PDFs that are available online for free, high quality PDFs that are available online with membership, and printed editions that are available through Amazon.com. As of this writing date, there were 9,929 books available with 5,246 in progress (What "in progress" really means, I don't know; have they actually prepared those titles, or simply counted the titles sitting on a shelf waiting to be processed?).
The low quality PDFs look pretty good when you open them. Then you read the fine print that explains that what you are really seeing in the first fifteen pages is really the high quality version; everything after page fifteen will be the "real" low quality. Additionally, vertical striping has been added to the files to deter others from printing and selling the books. The low quality PDFs would be useful only for reference. The scans are significantly harder to read, with multiple vertical stripes and distorted characters. Since they are downloads, they can be read offline using Adobe's Acrobat Reader or an alternative PDF viewer, but the quality makes it difficult to do so.
The high quality PDFs come at a cost: Forgotten Books charges a one time lifetime fee of $49 for up to 10 book downloads per week, or the "booklover" package, $69 for up to 100 downloads per week.
The last option for acquiring books is to backpedal to the print version, which is created through Print On Demand technology at Amazon.com. We have a title from Forgotten Books collection at the library. The book is paperback but sized around the same size as a standard hardcover. The book's quality appears every bit as good as a direct publisher trade paperback title, and the price was significantly less than I expected from POD technology. To me, however, there is an issue with the typesetting. As I look over the book, I can't help but feel I'm reading from the default template for Word 2007: the typeface is sans serif, the spacing between lines is just over single spacing (Word 2007 sets this at 1.15), and there is another space between paragraphs.
Forgotten Books divides their titles into two series: the Easy Reading and the Classic Reprint. The Easy Reading books appear to have been reformatted from their source material (resulting in the format I described above). The Classic Reprints are simply reproductions of titles as they appeared originally. This is not a new practice; I have a copy at home of Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune Telling that is a 1980s reprint of the original Charles Godfrey Leland text from 1891. Although the binding and the book cover were new, the contents were nothing more than reproductions of the original publication.