As if I needed more to read. As if I needed a reason to become even more tethered to my computer. As if Google hadn’t already provided me with all sorts of fun stuff to play with.

Now there are free downloads of public domain titles scanned from their original sources. That means a cool and wide variety of books that you can download whenever you realize that you have spent too much at Tattered Cover this month. Just as an example.

And speaking of examples, here’s an example of the stuff I’ve been downloading.

The dialects of Central Africa are very numerous, all the principal tribes employing forms of speech markedly, though not, I believe, radically distinct from each other. Ki-Swahili is the polite tongue, and stands towards purely local languages in much the same relation as French used to stand towards the other languages of Europe. Although corrupt Arabic enters to some extent into its composition, the basis of Ki-Swahili is pure Bantu; and, owing to this circumstance, it is more or less understood over the whole of the immense tracts that lie between the Zambesi and the sources of the Nile. It is, I believe, a lucid, precise, and copious tongue, not difficult to master, and well fitted to convey a variety of ideas with clearness and dignity…

That’s from Nyasaland Under the Foreign Office by Hector Livingston Duff, published in 1906 by George Bell.

Oh, man, I’m loving this.

Download your own freakishly obscure books (and start peppering your own blog posts with snippets of the texts) by going to the Google Book Search. Click the “full view books” option and enjoy the world’s biggest library.

(Hat tip to the Google Blog.)