Google makes novels free to print
 

Search engine Google plans to offer consumers the chance to download and print classic novels free of charge.
The firm's book search tool will let people print classics such as Dante's Inferno or Aesop's Fables, as well as other books no longer under copyright.

Until now, the service has only let people read such books on-screen.

Google's book search service stems from a wider project to put books online in a searchable format, which it is undertaking with major universities.

Working with Google on the Books Library project are Oxford University, Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan and the University of California, as well as the New York Public Library.

Volunteers working for a project known as Gutenberg have for some years copied out-of-copyright books as text files, which can then be used for printing, reading or piping into a programme for editing.

In contrast, Google is offering the books in a "print-ready" format, as have several other - albeit much smaller and less well-known - firms.

Online shopping site Amazon has offered limited online access to the contents of its huge bookstore.

full/rest of artical here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/5297412.stm

ooh that's some kind of awesome.

Gosh, the book will eventually disappear if this takes off

yeah i read about this in the guardian a while back, don't really understand how its going to work with copywrite and all. You can already get alot from Project Gutenberg, i've read quite a few books off my pc but it's annoying, plus i'm definitely not printing off a whole book. The book will never die out, i always have to own every book i enjoy reading, guess thats why i never use the library.

I can't really see why anyone would use it, what with penguin £1 classics. It would be so much more expensive to print it off, not to mention unwieldy.