Wow – I have just found the Rare Book Room (via Stingy Scholar). It is an educational website intended to allow the visitor to examine and read some of the great books of the world.
Over the last ten years, a company called “Octavo” embarked on digitally photographing some of the world â??s great books from some of the greatest libraries. These books were photographed at very high resolution (in some cases at over 200 megabytes per page).
This site contains all of the books (about 400) that have been digitized to date. These range over a wide variety of topics and rarity. The books are presented so that the viewer can examine all the pages in medium to medium-high resolution.
In particular the site contains:
1. Some of the great books in science, including books by Galileo, Newton, Copernicus, Kepler, Einstein, Darwin and others.
2. Most of the Shakespeare Quartos from the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the University of Edinburgh Library, and the National Library of Scotland. It also contains the First Folio from the Folger Shakespeare Library.
3. A complete set of Poor Richardâ??s Almanac by Benjaman Franklin.
4. Very rare editions: Gutenberg â??s Bible (from the Library of Congress), Harvey’s book on the circulation of blood, Galileo â??s Siderius Nuncius, the first printing of the Bill of Rights, and the Magna Carta.