Cheap access to electronic books

I work at a library that has a subscription to ebrary ( http://
www.ebrary.com/ ), a repository of electronic books. There's some
pretty cool linguistics books on there, and a lot of other subjects
too.  But I just noticed recently that there's also a version of
their service for the general public. The list of books is scaled
down somewhat compared to the institutional subscription version, but
there are still plenty of linguistics books on there*.

Now, it isn't *quite* free. In order to view the books, you need to
create an account and deposit at least $5 US in it (I'm not sure if
it's available outside the US), using a credit or debit card. As long
as you have at least $1.50 in credit, you can view books. Copying
text (for pasting somewhere else) from a book costs $0.50 per page
and printing costs $0.25 per page (at least with the book I'm looking
at now; it might vary by title).

Viewing the books requires installing a browser plugin. The plugin is
available for Windows and MacOS X. I have also got it working in
Linux using Wine, after using Sidenet ( http://sidenet.ddo.jp/
winetips/config.html ) to install IE 6.

I hope this is useful to other conlangers!

* Ironically, I found one book on accentual change that is available
through the general-public service but not through my employer's
account!)

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