Books that you can read online for free.

try http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/lists.html

Hmmm...no Hemingway there. Thanks for trying though.

Hmmm...I've looked around and I see Melville and Moby Dick everywhere, but no Hemingway. I bet it's that copyright law. What is it, 50 years until a copyright expires? I guess this book was written within that time. That must be it. Dammit. Oh well, I'll get the book somewhere anyway.

Still, that site you put up, Reg, is a good source for anyone who wants to get a little preview of some older classics. I think my eyes would bug out of my head if I tried to read a full book online like that though.

if that's the case, you'll have to wait another 7 years...

1923 appears to be some magic date, at least as I recall from putting poetry on the portal endlessly.

You might have been looking for this site: http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

I was going to mention Gutenberg's wonderful site.

The issue is always whether or not a work is in the public domain. When an author dies, the legatees are often able to renew copyrights for long periods of time. It is entirely possible that Hemingway's estate has renewed the copyrights for his work, and that this explains why it cannot be found online--i'm just throwing that out as a possibility, i'm not saying that i know it to be true.

It is also the case that there is an incomplete but good selection of book texts available at About-dot-com. However, i find the best way to find the text of books, poems, plays and other works is to type in the name of the author, the name of the work, and add the word "text." For example, "Mark Twain+To the Person Sitting in Darkness+text" will yield many results in a "google" search, many of which contain the entire text of a significant work of Mr. Clemens which remains little known to most readers in the English speaking world. That search method, with the criterion "(author)+(title)+text" is as nearly infallible as you can get for finding, somewhere, the complete text of any work which is in the public domain.

While in pursuit of Dutch Herring I found a new-to-me ramification of Google.

http://books.google.com/bkshp?ie=UTF-8&tab=wp

I'm going back to explore.

Copyright has been gradually extended, and it's now on the order of 93 years. One of the major players in keeping stuff out of public domain has been Disney, who put major juju on Congress so they didn't lose the ownership of Mickey Mouse (seriously).