Geeky readers out there might want to know that Google Books is now making many of its out-of-print collection available as downloadable and printable PDFs. They list 42,500 entries under “Society of Friends”:http://books.google.com/books?q=%22society+of+friends%22&btnG=Search+Books&as_brr=1 I’m unsure whether this is books with that phrase or pages inside books with that phrase, but either way that’s a lot of reading. A quick breeze turns up some good titles. Thanks to “Tech Crunch”:http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/08/30/google-allows-downloads-of-out-of-copyright-books/ for the Google news. Older online book projects worth a mention: “Project Gutenberg”:http://www.gutenberg.org the “Christian Classics Etherial Library”:http://www.ccel.org/ and the Earlham School of Religion’s useful but clunky “Digital Quaker Collection”:http://esr.earlham.edu/dqc/.
Martin,
From the link you’ve provided, the Google search looks as though each and every page they’ve reproduced is indexed as a “hit” on the search.
Just my amateurish opinion. Thanks for the info, though!
— Chris M.
*Hi Chris:* You mean how it shows over 42,000 titles with matches to “society of friends”? Yes, that is odd. It looks like the right number is closer to 287, which sounds about right.