We have put together an online library of old (with a couple more recent works) veg-related books (many from the 19th century and earlier) - complete copies, mostly courtesy of the scanning being done by Google and Microsoft.
We now have a collection of 186 old books and journals in the IVU Online Libary - these are mostly complete original books in PDF format (some of them quite large so do check the file size).
All the books are old and out of copyright - the earliest being printed in 1700, but most are from the 19th century. A few are just plain text files, and some have been converted to web pages, especially the extracts from old magazines.
If you are interest in vegetarian history, or just want to see what the old books looked like, then check out the huge range at: www.ivu.org/history/online-library.html - all in English so far but we plan to add books in other languages soon.
The idea of putting all out of copyright books online started with Project Gutenberg some years back, now part of wikipedia - see www.gutenberg.org - but that is done by volunteers with the results only in plain text files. Reading a book of several hundred pages in one long text file is not something most people find very easy.
Over the last couple of years Google (books.google.com) and Microsoft have started throwing their considerable finances into this, as free public service, and are now scanning vast numbers of books from university and public libraries - and they are scanning them in the original book format, so you can have the actual book on screen. Using the 'two-up' page option allows for turning the pages in a traditional way that some people prefer to the plain text versions.
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