Do you know what happens if you open a Google search window and type in "free ebooks"? You get overwhelmed very quickly, that's what happens. (Remarkably few porn returns, though; that's always a pleasant surprise.)

From this totally overwhelming list -- approximately 22,800,000 in .37 seconds -- I've picked, more or less at random, a site to point out this week and I've got lots of material for weeks to come which is just awesome.

This week's is the free ebooks section of The Book Depository. If you haven't used it before -- UK readers may be more familiar with this site than those of us in the US -- the Book Depository is a great used/new book-selling site; I've found wonderful stuff on here and, because the site only just opened a US 'branch' and is based out of the UK, you can find UK authors who are really hard to track down in the States. And they have a really cool free ebooks site. Obviously, most of what's on this site is for sale and it can be a little confusing to navigate, so be sure of what you're clicking on. If you're starting from the page I linked to above, I suggest clicking on the "Search free ebooks" link -- a small green arrow on the right -- rather than browsing through the categories on the left or searching via the main bar at the top of the page. This way, you're pretty much guaranteed to only get free results. You can get to the free ebooks site from either the UK or the US web address; it's linked straight from the main page.

The second search page is a little awkward to read 'til you get used to it -- the free ebook versions are listed alongside the for sale analog versions. But from here you can browse more easily via the search bar or the categories on the left which conveniently note how many titles in each are free ebooks.

There's quite a variety of material available here, from George Moore's Confessions of a Young Man to P.G. Wodehouse's Carry on, Jeeves, or Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution.

The Book Depository's ebooks are available only in one format: Adobe .pdf. The .pdfs are pretty vanilla: there's a title page, a page with the publisher logo, and then you're into the text. There isn't any bibliographic information, so these might be tricky to use for scholarly or academic purposes if you want to treat the .pdf like a "real world" book. On the other hand, many academic disciplines are getting happier and happier about students using electronic texts, so I may just be showing my age there.

Most of what's available -- as I browsed through -- is older material and, I would guess, public domain. The Book Depository hasn't gone head to head with Dan Brown, for example, to bring you a free ebook version of his latest. But some of these texts are rather hard to find -- check out some of the Bram Stoker books and novellas they have, for example -- and I think this could be a valuable site to have in your bookmarks list.