Scribd.com

[fubar57]

Pretty sure a lot of you know about the web site Scribd. A wealth of books on aircraft and a zillion other mundane topics that the rest of the world seems to be interested in (Practical Beekeeping-1907).The vast majority can be downloaded for free(Found a lot of Tamiya back issues). However, once an article or book has been "archived", they would like you to pay a daily,monthly etc. fee. Had a bunch of sads for months as there were many books, etc. that were out of reach until I started cruising around the site. It seems that if you upload something, you are sometimes free to download from the archives for 24 hrs. As a trial, I uploaded some manuals I downloaded from them(Hey, it's done there) and sure enough, the archives were open(Practical Horsemanship-1891,-256pgs anyone?). There are a few books that are for sale and some that are undownloadable(nondownloadable, indownloadable). Oh...the site does make you work for your search. Type in Spitfire and hundreds of articles show up but maybe 1 per page may be about the aircraft. The other articles might have the words spit or fire in them. Most of my luck has been entering Aircraft, Air Force, or Luftwaffe in the search box. Sorry about the length of the rant.

Geo

P.S. For the few of you that know me and have encouraged me to get it together, I have chosen to start AND finish a Harvard 2 in the colors of the RNFLAF found at this site:
The Pink and the Black - The Royal Newfoundland Air Force > Vintage Wings of Canada

 

[RabidAlien]

Yep, I keep a folder with a bunch of PDF files it in specifically for uploading to scribd when I need/want a document. I've uploaded owners' manuals for Konica-Minolta Bizhub copiers in order to get documents on Patton, so they don't care about subject matter. Just be careful that the document is not still owned or copyrighted by anybody, their filters can be a bit strict. I uploaded a book once, printed in the late 1800's and now in "public domain" status, but apparently Project Gutenberg owns the book or something, because I got an email stating that it was Gutenberg's book, even though it was free from their site. But I still had 24 hours to download, so I went ahead and got a couple of Mosin-Nagant manuals while I was there. The next time I went, I felt bad, so I uploaded two docs.