Free e-Books Project Gutenberg has over 100,000 e-books that you can download for free: http://www.gutenberg.org 
The Universal Library at archive.org has over 70,000 free, out of copyright, e-books. I have found a number of books on there that I couldn't find at Project Gutenberg: http://www.archive.org/details/universallibrary 
ManyBooks has over 23,000 e-books that you can download for free in a number of different file formats: http://manybooks.net Quite a lot (though by no means all) of the e-books on lulu.com can be downloaded for free: http://www.lulu.com 
(Lulu is a company which allows authors to publish in small print runs rather than relying on large publishing houses) A nice German company, GASL, has made its out of copyright publications available here: http://www.gasl.org/wordpress/?page_id=67 Unfortunately the site is in German, but the link above is to the latest additions to its catalogue and it's quite clear which of the books are in English. Just click on a link to download a book. If you click on Alphabetisch A-H, Alphabetisch I-P, Alphabetisch Q-Z you'll see their other titles. For example, here's a PDF download of Alice in Wonderland from their site. Newspapers and Feed Readers Buying a paper newspaper is a non-thrifty habit I haven't given up, partly because I prefer the experience of reading the physical paper, and partly because I think it would be a big cultural loss if paper newspapers were to disappear, just as it would if paper books were to disappear. However, to get a broader range of opinions than from just one paper I enjoy flicking through a whole range of newspapers and blogs using a feed reader. Practically all national newspapers and lots of blogs publish RSS feeds, which allow you to browse through just the constantly updated headlines and only click on the articles which interest you. (Just type RSS and the names of the newspapers into Google and you will find the feed addresses). This is a lot quicker than having to go to a specific newspaper site and navigate to individual articles. The feed reader I use is Liferea in Linux. There are lots of other feed readers for Linux and other operating systems, including Google Reader. See this Wikimedia comparison: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_feed_aggregators If you find it a bit confusing, Google has produced a guide to help those who are new to RSS / web feeds: http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2009/01/google-reader-for-beginners.html All the world's news on a pagehttp://newsmap.jp/ displays news from all around the world on a single page. The size of the boxes linking to the stories indicate how popular the stories are and the boxes are colour coded according to subject. There's a separate tab for each country. A very clever idea. Newspaper Paywall Madness
There is quite a lot of talk at the moment of newspapers jumping on a Murdoch-inspired bandwagon (as if he doesn't have enough in his piggy bank already...) and trying to charge for online content. I happen to agree with Arianna Huffington that trying to turn the clock back fifteen years, in the process un-inventing Tim Berners-Lee's invention of a free and open network is not a particularly good idea, and that newspapers need to figure out some new ways of making money rather than trying to turn the internet into an expensive patchwork of balkanized, walled gardens: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/11/newspapers-web-media-pay-wall If my favourite newspaper starts trying to charge for online content, I shall seriously consider whether to carry on forking out every day for its paper edition. Of course advertisers are spending less at the moment - it's called a recession. Everyone else has to deal with it so why should newspapers be any different. If newspapers wanted to stop making their content available online for free, they could do just that. Le Canard enchaîné, a well known French satirical magazine has an entertaining and apologetic little message on its (single-page, news-free) website pointing out that they are in the business of publishing a paper magazine and would like to stay that way. The truth is the large media groups want it all ways. They want to charge for paper editions, attract new readers online, charge advertisers for online and offline advertising and now charge readers for online content too. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending which side of the paywall you're sitting on) that's not an equation that stacks up. If Wall Street Journal readers are willing to pay for online content, I suspect it's because they've got more money than sense, either that or (more likely) their companies are paying for the subscription at everyone else's expense. Peter Preston, the former editor of the Guardian, has had more changes of mind about newspaper paywalls than a five year old making its mind up about Christmas presents (which makes this quite ironic), but if he were to manage another swing back to being in favour then he'd need to be very good at unremembering what he wrote here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/sep/06/newspapers-websites-internet-advertising which was one of the best descriptions I have read of why the idea of trying to charge for newspapers online is completely barmy - but then I might be underestimating human stupidity. (How many people pay £60 per month for Sky TV?) On the other hand, the Murdochs haven't exactly demonstrated a particularly good understanding of the web with MySpace: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/mar/29/myspace-facebook-bebo-twitter One thing I do know - I certainly won't be paying for an online newspaper subscription any time in the near future - and I'm a huge newspaper fan. (And it looks like, if Alan Rusbridger sticks to his guns, I won't have to: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/jan/25/cudlipp-lecture-alan-rusbridger ) Old Man Murdoch Finally Loses It Proof, if any further proof were needed, that the Dirty Digger has finally lost it comes in this entertaining article from the FT where the mad old Aussie threatens to sue the BBC and Google for allegedly using Murdoch generated content: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ab874200-cd28-11de-a748-00144feabdc0.html As an interesting experiment I thought I'd go through all the links to news articles on the front page of this site and remove any links to Times or Sunday Times articles. Out of well over a hundred links there were about four or five to Times and Sunday Times articles. That's not because I've been deliberately avoiding linking to them, but because they are rubbish. (Though not, I have to admit, quite as bad as the Observer - which makes Sundays problematic. I'd pay not to have to read Nick Cohen, Polly Toynbee and Will Hutton. Note to self, must try the Sunday Torygraph again. Oh dear, perhaps not. Just tried that and I don't think Torygraph adequately desribes it any more. There was so much beard coverage, I thought I'd accidentally bought a copy of the Völkische Beobachter. Perhaps Sundays will have to become a newspaper day of rest...) The Times and Sunday Times have largely turned into comics under Murdoch ownership. I think the Dirty Digger will be surprised to find that the internet will do just fine without any of his content - and unless he wants to turn the front page of the Times into a permanent streaming service for sports events that he's wangled a monopoly on, then he'll be able to give up on the idea of advertisers paying to advertise to an audience the size of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyll-llantysiliogogogoch. This is quite amusing on the subject: Alt Text: Clever Murdoch Turns News into Hip Underground Club Or sadly not...The other side of the story is well put by Emily Bell (who is as sane as the day is long), who points out that the belief that Rupe has lost his marbles is almost certainly wishful thinking, and that the Digger's recent apparently bonkers remarks are just a very deliberate part of his multi-year strategy to get the Tories to emasculate the BBC for him and further entrench his monopoly of pay TV, all for a plug in the super soaraway and a few nice dinners. Which of course implies that it's the Tory politicians who need their marbles investigated: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/organgrinder/2009/nov/13/murdoch-attacks-google-cameron Probably just as well for the internet in the UK, as Emily Bell alludes in her article, that senior members of the Tory party have been having what used to be called Ugandan discussions with senior employees of Google for some time. Who knows, perhaps it will all end with Google and the Murdochs in bed together. Stranger things have happened. (And of course they are already in the shape of My Space, though by all accounts not particularly happily.) Some people are suggesting that all Murdoch is trying to do (for example by threatening to work exclusively with Microsoft on search) is extract more money from Google. That I vaguely have some sympathy with (given that Google typically take 90% of the income from Adsense advertising - though I imagine they're more generous to media conglomerates), but I wouldn't bet on his chances of succeeding. If Google started sharing advertising revenue fairly, they'd probably halve their income almost immediately. If they do do a deal I imagine it would be a secret one, though I don't know how you'd manage to keep that out of a company's accounts - perhaps they could bring back Andrew Fastow. The campaign to destroy the BBC I have less sympathy with, though I do struggle to understand either Jonathon Ross or Mark Thompson's salaries. Though now that Jonathon Ross has announced he's leaving all they need to do is get rid of Mark Thompson, and perhaps ask Greg Dyke to come back again (after all he now seems relatively chummy with David Cameron) and they'd look almost normal again. With any luck James Murdoch will find that if there's one thing you can never trust it's an Old Etonian - they're just not trained that way. The French didn't use to call us perfidious Albion for nothing. Incidentally, if you're looking for a good alternative to Google as a search engine, have a look at Duckduckgo: http://duckduckgo.com/ 
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