Google Print
If you haven't tried Google Print yet, you should check it out. It's pretty neat. With a free Google account, you can type in an author and it'll bring up a list of books by that author. "Cheserton," for instance, brought up pages of results. You click on the book, and it gives you all sorts of information about it, but not the content of the book itself.
However: You can search the book. You type in a word, and it brings up a list of pages where that word appears, and then you can access that particular page and read it. Some pages aren't available, but in my quick experiment with GKC's classic, Orthodoxy, about 90% of the pages were available for reading. At this time, only books in the public domain (books with unexpired copyrights) are available, but that's fine. It's a heckuva free service for people who read a lot and later have troubles finding a particular passage--something that ails me at least once a week.
Related: And if you need part of a book that's still covered by copyright:
Amazon.com Inc. on Thursday previewed a service to sell just a few pages or chapters of a book – allowing one of the world's oldest media to be chopped up and customized like an album on iTunes.
In the age of screens, is this turning into the Book Nerd's Golden Age?
