Did you know that many classic books are available for free on the internet? You can even get them in PDF format, so you can print up the pages as they would look in the "offline" book.
See the set of classics available at PDFworld, for example. They've got titles from Kafka to Dostoevsky.
Instead of buying Joyce's Ulysses and leaving it forever (unread) on the shelf, now you can just bookmark the site and leave it on the, er, virtual shelf!
These books are free because they come from an era when copyright laws did not favour the publisher as much as they do today. Indeed, copyright laws were originally developed to help artists make an income from their ouvres, for a short time, after which the work would lapse into the "public domain".
Modern publishing companies, in various art and entertainment industries, have cynically manipulated these laws over the years so that now they favour the publishing "middlemen", and not the artists.
But the internet is changing all that. :)
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