Have you heard of Forgotten Books?

I know some of our readers are a fan of the classics.  Some people like old books by authors that may have been dead for centuries. Well there’s an online library available for people just like you, you book sniffers. It is called Forgotten Books.

Or maybe you’re a historian or researcher and have a need to quickly search many books for a certain criterion. For example, I thought it would be interesting to see how often “Cat” shows up in these old books. Check out my results?

Cat is the 3,068th (of 21) most common word in non-fiction, the 2,113th (of 271) most common word in fiction, and the 2,823rd most common word across all books. Cat is more commonly used in fiction books.

I also wanted to do an image search, and again for cats, because I’m me, and check out this lovely page excerpt from a book.

Where did I do this search? I did a Word Data search on Forgotten Books .

What is Forgotten Books?

Forgotten Books is the a HUGE online library with 484,473 books available on demand. That’s from their website, that is the exact number of books they have available.  These are literally forgotten books that are likely out of print or are hard to find.  Their collection includes the classics people love as well as those oldies just waiting to be rediscovered.

The Forgotten Books website also includes analytical data. They have analyzed every single word, page and image of their library of 484,473 books and the results are available for word and image data searches.

Want to know what types of books they carry? Well, check out this category list:

Does it cost anything?

There are free books of the day, and those can be downloaded and read for free (all you need is an account). Other books under their copyright require a membership to read them. According to their website, Full Membership status starts from $8.99 per month with access to their entire library. With a full membership you can download the books onto various apps or read them on the site, but a free membership lets you have access to quite a bit of information as well.

Thoughts?

Personally, I’m not a big classics reader. Also, since I’m not a researcher and do not have a need to reference many of  these old academic books, the full membership is not right for me. However, I definitely see the benefit for people who do exactly that. I can definitely see a literature student or someone working on their dissertation enjoying that search features and finding Forgotten Books to fit their needs.

What do you think of this library site? Have you tried it?

Note: I was provided a free membership to ForgottenBooks.com in exchange for my honest review.

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