Online books
Various websites provide access to digitised copies of books. You will find many links to online books across the FIBIwiki.
See also:
Google Books
Google Books is an online repository of digitised books scanned from libraries around the world. Books that are labelled 'Full View' can be read in their entirety and pdf copies can be saved to your computer.
There are thousands of books that have content relevant for family history research including directories, civil lists, biographies and military histories. As well as reading around a topic or finding out about a place, it is worth searching an ancestor's name in inverted commas. You might have to try various combinations of the name. This is particularly successful for ancestor's of a certain social class living in the first half of the nineteenth century, but you never know what you might find. Try tracing an officer's career via listings of promotions, look for births/marriages/deaths or find the postings of an apothecary. Using the Advanced Search to narrow down the time frame of publication can be useful.
FIBIS on Google Books
FIBIS has a Google Books library with books on topics related to its aims. You can search within the books in the library, a useful technique for eliminating results unrelated to historical British India topics. The library is currently still growing.
- View the FIBIS Google Books Library
Archive.org
Project Gutenberg
Over 30,000 free electronic books to download. The books available are out of copyright, so there are many dating from the 19th century. They are available in Plain text (.txt) format, having been OCR scanned and carefully checked by volunteers.