Come to the World eBook Fair

Every year, some of the top ebook companies and organisations come together to offer extremely large numbers of ebooks, absolutely free (mostly as in beer, but often as in freedom) as part of the World eBook Fair. Here are the facts and figures:

Third Annual World eBook Fair: July 4th to August 4th

Just two years ago The First World eBook Fair came on the scene with about 1/3 million books, doubled to 2/3 million in 2008, and now over one million.

Created by contributions from 100+ eLibraries from around the world, here are the largest collections.

As of midnight Central Daylight Time July 4, 2008 these are the approximate numbers:

100,000+ from Project Gutenberg
500,000+ from The World Public Library
450,000+ from The Internet Archive
160,000+ from eBooks About Everything

..17,000+ from IMSLP

1,227,000+ Grand Total

Pretty impressive.

And while we're on the subject of free, here is a good list of "100+ Sources for Free-As-In-Beer Books & Texts Online", which includes a lot of fairly obscure but highly worthy sites. Recommended.