On-Line Books

 

You can find The On-Line Books Page at digital.library.upenn.edu/books, which boasts more the 12,000 english language titles.  I searched the site for Thomas Mann.  Nothing.  Instead I found a page devoted to five papers called Hymns of Wesley and Watts by one Bernard Manning (no, not that one), published by the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.  There was no online text, only bibliographical details.  I then tried Jane Austen.  Much better, with copious references and links to online texts.  The list of recent acquisitions includes academic texts in all subject areas, reassuring for anyone who still prefers novels printed in ink on paper.

 

The On-Line Books Page features no visuals, so you may want to titillate the eye a little and see what is going on between the Earth, the Moon and the Sun.  Images and live webcasts of eclipses lunar and solar can be found at eclipse.span.ch, though in order to see the action your visit will have to be timed carefully.  The site gives exhaustive eclipse schedules, alongside links to space-flight webcasts.  A Space Library, co-hosted by Nasa, JPL and Caltech at samadhi.jpl.nasa.gov, has spectacular images, real and imagined, of planets and their moons, spacecraft data (for the purpose of emulation), and a virtual solar system that I found impossible to access.  If this is because of heavy traffic, as seems likely, it is a good sign.  This is a clearly designed site with a good sense of its own boundaries.