A big congratulations to The Internet Archive, which announced yesterday that it has hit two million free digital texts. The 2 millionth text, if you’re wondering, is Homiliary on Gospels from Easter to first Sunday of Advent, which is a thousand-year-old book, handwritten in Latin.

I don’t mind that it’s a thousand years old but I don’t think I’ll get past the Latin. If you’re looking for other books to explore, check out the Internet Archive Ebooks and Texts section at http://www.archive.org/details/texts. (Actually that section says it has 2.2+ million texts. I wonder where the others came from? Anyway.) The books here are divided into several sections, including books from American libraries (the largest section with 1.2 million texts), books from Canadian libraries, Open Source books, Project Gutenberg, and Children’s Library. If you want to browse check the nav on the right for the most popular downloads of all time, the most popular downloads of this week, and Editor’s Picks.

You can do keyword searches, too. If you want to do anything beyond a simple keyword search I recommend you go straight to
the advanced search page; there are so many fields available to search that it’s hard to remember them all. The advanced search is easier.

If you can’t think of anything to search for let me recommend a few fun ones. Try Joe Worker and the Story of Labor (it’s a comic!) or Punch (one of several volumes the IA has available) or, if you’re looking for a little Timothy Leary and Stewart Brand, how about a copy of Psychedelic
Review from 1967?

You’ve probably gotten the idea; The Internet Archive’s texts selection is huge and eclectic, and with over two million items now available you’ll have no trouble finding something of interest.