There are several sources of books free to view and sometimes download electronically, e.g.:
- Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is a consortium of 12 natural history and botanical libraries that cooperate to digitize and make accessible the legacy literature of biodiversity held in their collections and to make that literature available for open access and responsible use as a part of a global “biodiversity commons.”)
- Botanicus.org (a freely accessible portal to historic botanical literature from the Missouri Botanical Garden Library)
- Europeana think culture
- Google Books
- Internet Archive (digital library of free books and more)
- kobobooks.com
- NetLibrary.com (also available through the Lummi Library website)
- OpenLibrary
- Project Gutenberg (free eBooks)
- WorldCat (find items in libraries near you)