Give the Kindle or Sony’s eBook reader another generation or two and they’ll get it right. Or, according to Jerry Pournelle, get Apple to allow you to have a PDF reader on your iPhone (or iPod Touch) and you’ll have the perfect ebook reader for even old fogeys.
One site that has much more recent, still-in-copyright academic and scholarly books is ebrary.
Searching and reading the books online is free, but you have to open an account and put $US5 in it. The money is then kept as credit against any printing or copying that you want to do. Prices vary, but it’s generally about 25c per page. Because the books are still in copyright, you can’t just download them.
Basically, if you never want to copy or print out the books, but just want to read or refer to them online, you get unlimited searching and reading of 20,000 books by high quality presses for an investment of 5 bucks. I joined some months ago, and my $5 deposit is still intact.
Reading the books requires downloading a browser plugin. If you’re on Firefox, it’s an .xpi file, like a regular Firefox extension.
No, just doesn’t feel the same. 
Try http://www.mobipocket.com, which publishes books for mobipocket ereader software, which is free, and works on PCs and several handheld ereaders. Some mobipocket books are free, most are not. My books are published on mobipocket.com. Mobipocket uses DRM to protect the copyright on the books, so if you’re against that, you won’t like Mobipocket. Also, most of mobipocket’s library (including my books) has been adapted for the Kindling ereader sold by Amazon, which is how Amazon got that huge library for its ereader device so fast. The Kindling is far from free.
I spend hours at Distributed Proofreaders helping to make these online books available for downloading.
It’s a way to pay back for all the ones I have downloaded.
www.wowio.com is another free site for downloading books (including comic books).
I just tried that this week with Company Aytch, which is only 149 pages or so. The problem I found was the wasted paper (due to the huge margins). Is there some way to buy smaller printer paper, and set the margins in word to print more like a book?
Sorry, but I know next to nothing about Word. Someone probably will be in shortly who does.