I settle down in solitude at water's edge. Warm waves lap, lap at the edge of my blanket; the faint cry of a gull floats in on salty breeze. A puddle of shade under an umbrella hides from the arcing sun, and there I sip cold lemonade and read the day away.

The Online Reader

Books Online

From Aristophanes to Homer to Xenophon, all the classics of ancient Greece are provided in English translation by The Perseus Project. Or for the genuine experience, you can choose to read them in Greek. Thanks to the efforts of Project Gutenberg and others, the number of out- of- copyright books now available for reading online is in the thousands and increasing rapidly.

Search for what's currently available on The Online Books Page, now listing more than 6000 English- language works. U of Chicago offers additional works in an image-based format, as does U Penn's CETI.

Want some guidance? There are several sites offering just that, beginning with The Internet Book Information Center - "A personal, selective, opinionated guide" that Publishers Weekly calls "The granddaddy of book-related sites on the Internet." Books and Stories Online is an excellent collection of links to online reading resources, and Books Online is another, with particular emphasis on non-English language resources.More international links are on the Western European Texts Online page. Remember to take along a babelfish!

If all else fails, just start from the top with Yahoo Books Online.

Booksellers Old and New

Booknet International is the "world-wide gateway to rare, antiquarian books" with links to websites and dealer catalogues, and to the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers.Search for dealers by specialty. Some dealers have online catalogs of current stock. The Rare and Antique Books page on Yahoo includes links to periodicals, classes, and book fairs along with rare book dealers.

Borders has joined Barnes and Noble and Amazon.com in a struggle to dominate the market for online book orders. Ordering books is now as easy as ordering pizza - and the selection is near-total. You may prefer giving your business to a smaller specialty vendor or to an "Independent Associate" of one of the big Booksellers. Our favorite is JJ's Books. (This is a shameless plug, because we helped pick out the selection!)

The Writer

Newspapers, Magazines, and Ezines

Search The Current News

The Newsroom is a one-page list of links to the richest news resources on the web, from Reuters to Legislative Information. Another favorite source for news on the web is Time Warner's CNN and of course, TIME magazine.

Move out of the mainstream with The Village Voice, venerable newspaper of the New York avant-garde. If you would explore the ephemeral and astonishing world of e-zines, investigate eZines, the "Ultimate Magazine Database," which offers a rating system, inviting your vote, on a narrow bar that appears over each selection. Magazines listed range from standards like National Geographic to obscure one-issue wonders. The e-zine-list, another database with 2000+ entries, offers a non-commercialized interface and a somewhat different selection. Both listed the fine youth ezine Spank! Finally, don't overlook Virtual Athens' own Athens City Times.

Your day on the Aegean won't be complete until you've browsed through the Athens News, which has regular sections covering "every aspect of Greek news -be it politics, social issues, business, arts & entertainment and sports- as well as international news."

 

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