The Online Books Page is a website that facilitates access to books that are freely readable over the Internet. It also aims to encourage the development of such online books, for the benefit and edification of all.
to foster clear writing and clear thinking, to stress social awareness, aesthetic appreciation and intellectual growth; causing students to set their individual lives against the larger backdrops of history and culture through the study of language and li
Although one could argue that the genre dates back millennia, Samuel Smiles coined a new term when he published Self-Help in 1859 consequently opening the floodgates to authors attempting to solve the world’s problems one narcissistic step at a time. If one searches the term “self help” in Google today, almost fifty-eight million matches will be returned. An arguably large segment of the self-help phenomena involves books that assist us in specific areas such as personal finance, knitting, or sex. The “For Dummies” publisher alone has over seventy-eight thousand titles currently available on Amazon.com. This is not a modern day marvel. A vast array of how-to books was available to readers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Starting with the premise that these books purport to be the final word on the matter, examples of early manuals, templates, recipe books, diagrams, and “(...)