Google Books can be used to search the full text of books from title to index. You can search for certain phases in a book, search the index and get a preview of the book's content. If you find a relevant book you can download a complete book if it is in the public domain. You can purchase books to be loaded on to an iPhone, iPad, or other device. You can also request books that are relevant to your research by using the library's interlibrary loan system, Illiad.
Full View: You can access the complete work if it is out of copyright or if the author or publisher has allowed the book to be available in a fully viewable format. You can view any page and if the book is in the public domain you can download, save or print a PDF version. You can search the content of the book.
Limited Preview: A limited number of pages from the book will be available for viewing and content searching is allowed.
Snippet View: Just a few sentences to display your search term in context of the book. Publishing information is available at this level.
No Preview Available: Just the basic bibliographic information about the book will be displayed.
A number of online repositories offer full text access to books, many of which were published centuries ago and are available in the public domain.