Free Geography Books

I recently got an Ipad Mini and started to look for free books to download from Kindle, Google, Project Gutenberg, and the many other free resources that are available online. Once I started looking for geospatial and geography related books the list became almost mesmerizing. I found old books from “Home Geography for Primary Grades”  in Google ebooks to The Atlas of Ancient and Classical Geography by Samuel Butler in Project Gutenberg.  Some of the books are good examples of traditional cartographic methods such as “Terrestrial and Celestial GLOBES: Their History and Construction Including A Consideration of their Value as Aids in the Study of Geography and Astronomy  which was scanned in to Project Gutenberg.  Kindle ereader and Project Gutenberg both have copies of  “Geography and Plays” by Gertrude Stein, which is written in the then modern style of the 1920’s about different countries around the world. Exploring the old geography books online is a fun way to spend an afternoon.

If you are looking for something more recent, Google ebooks and Google Scholar provides a significant number of chapters for more current books and journal articles on GIS and geospatial technologies including from 2013. Google Scholar also includes a patent search, legal documents, Federal and State courts. This is interesting reading even if it isn’t specifically in your industry, because you might just come across a new area of interest.