Combine a library with the internet, and you know you’ve got me hooked right there! Those are two of my favorite things! I just love each new thing that we can do on the internet to enrich our lives. And Questia is definitely a cool one! And with Over 5,000 FREE Books in their public domain index, I’d say that rocks! And they also are running free trial subscriptions for sets of books in one of four selected topics: Psychology, Ethics, Leadership, or Early American History.
There are so many great features to this site, that I’m not even sure where to start. I’m sure I will miss something that I want to tell you and then I’ll just come back and post about them again.
Let’s start with the cost, shall we? It’s very reasonable for the amazing service provided, in my opinion. There are four ways to pay – you can get one month for $19.95, one quarter for $44.95, one year for $99.95, or a lifetime membership for $399.95. I like the way they’ve given a lot of options for payment, that offers quite a bit of flexibility for all of us.
And with the service they offer – those are great prices! So let’s get into some of that now! Questia offers complete books, cover to cover, along with journals, magazines, newspapers, and an encyclopedia! They also provide a listing of over 6,000 research topics!
I have not explored all the forms of media within Questia, yet, but, I have explored the books. And I am totally psyched on this software/program/website! Let me tell you a little bit about what happens when you open a book.
The book opens in a program similar to a PDF and it has a toolbar on the top of it, and a menu to the left, with all of the chapters listed. Just like a PDF, you can hide the chapter menu. The toolbar on the top is so cool, though!
I’ve chosen a book called Stepping Out of the Shadows, Alabama Women 1819-1990, edited by Mary Martha Thomas. The first thing that I did was to highlight some text. This is a great feature – you just highlight the text you want, as you normally would on a computer – then select ‘highlight’ in the tool bar and I can select from six different highlighter colors. And then highlight, as if it’s a real book sitting in front of me!
Oh my, this is getting long – I think I’m going to have to break this up into several posts, to make sure you stay with me!
There are two more features that I want to go ahead and talk about, though. One of them is the ‘bibliography’ button in the toolbar. This is really handy. If I’m working on a research paper, and I want to add a page I’m reading to my bibliography, I just click this tab on the toolbar, and then I’m given a couple options. I can add it to my bibliography within my Questia account, or I can download it and save the file to my computer, and it is already properly formatted. And they even give you tips about formatting, if you need them. My only issue with this feature is that I know that I worked hard, as a kid, to learn the proper formatting of a bibliography. And I learned it by doing it, over and over again. So I’m afraid, if it’s done for kids, they won’t ever learn it. This could be the finickiness of a grammar nerd talking and you might argue, ‘What job besides an editor really needs to know that?’ Well, this grammar nerd thinks that, for reasons she can’t quite explain, kids just need to learn that. I just do. So while it’s handy, it could also become a handicap.
The other thing I wanted to talk about was the fact that there are links to all of the social bookmarking sites within the books. I don’t understand that, because, if it is a paid membership to see the content, how would my bookmarking it for others – who couldn’t see it – help them? So I’m a little confused about that feature. I’ll dig around and see what I can find out about it.
And I’ll continue my review of all the amazing features of Questia in another post soon.






