: Google now has about a billion free books on canoes and kayaks, available
: online or on PDF, and all the classic literature on arctic exploration,
: canoeing, etc.

Wow. This is a lot larger resource than what I had been using.

Project Gutenberg, (http://www.gutenberg.org) wsa the first to start distributing free e-books online, working from digitized texts of out-of-copyright literture. They only have two books showing up when you search for "canoe", and none at all when you search for "kayak". One of them is Nathaniel Bishop's story "Voyage of the Paper Canoe; a geographical journey of 2500 miles, from Quebec to the Gulf of Mexico, during the years 1874-5"

If you are looking for old books to read, you might check out their site. True, they have a smaller collection, but they have proofreaders who check the scans against the text, they have some ability to convert the scanned text to speech for those who want or need spoken text, and they offer the books in various formats, including those which you can read on a Palm pilot and some mobile phones.

PGJ