Questia
Questia, which focuses on the humanities and social sciences, claims
to be the largest on-line library with more than 400,000 titles
(books, journals, newspapers, and magazines). While fee-based on-line
libraries have been criticized for aggressive marketing to students,
Questia does offer some advantages over traditional libraries: they
are open 24 hours a day, the contents of their holdings can be
searched, there are no late fees, and they offer the means to
electronically make notes in the works. Nonetheless, they say, "our
service is not designed to be a substitute for a traditional library
but rather is designed to make an extensive collection of titles and
research tools available online to students 24 hours a day, 7 days a
week." Their economics holdings seem to be fairly extensive.
Two of their most interesting features are automatic bibliography
generation and full-featured searching, which includes searching the
contents of works (this would seem to make it a powerful plagiarism
detection tool -- indeed, this can be done free of charge). Note that
non-subscribers have the ability to do complete searches. One
significant restriction of Questia is that you can download only one
page at a time.
Currently, they charge $19.95 a month, with reduced rates for longer
periods.
http://www.questia.com/
