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Part one

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Google Labs and more - part two

Saga Magazine technology columnist Jonathan Margolis recommends these useful websites to help you on your way

Second hand books

A wonderful American website, bartleby.com, continues the great internet tradition of knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Bartleby features hundreds of out-of-copyright books – fiction, non-fiction and reference – all digitised and available for nothing. So if it’s an elusive Shakespeare, Milton or Plato quote you’re after, you can find every word these sages wrote in a fraction of a second.

Unwanted goods

If you hate throwing good stuff away and have an environmental conscience, freecycle.org is organised by environmentalists with the very laudable aim of helping us pass on unwanted goods of all kinds (household goods, that is – they don’t want your industrial waste) to new owners who will cherish it. A tip, though: first set up a special email address on a free service like Hotmail, otherwise you’ll find your normal inbox swamped with mail from all those mad-keen junk collectors out there.

Out of print books

It’s slightly ironic that one of the businesses that has been most revolutionised by the internet is second-hand and rare book sales. Based in California, albris.com, offers the most fantastic service, reasonable prices and – best of all – over 60 million used, new and out-of-print books are in stock. It’s practically impossible to catch Albris out, even on obscure British books. The prices are reasonable and delivery only takes a few days.

History of the internet

Amazingly, the internet already has a history. Take a look at billions of archived web pages with an incredible thing called The Wayback Machine at archive.org, which has been archiving historically and culturally significant data since 1996 – material that has never existed as anything other than bits and bytes.

This article was created: 8 January 2007.
This article was last edited: 20 March 2007.

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