As of today, the British Library has begun to offer British Library Direct, a search-and-order service that allows readers to download or order on paper journal articles from a database of over 9 million articles (the last five year's worth of 20,000 journals). Many articles can be downloaded immediately as pdf files, readable with a standard free Adobe Reader program, but there is a fee for each download. It pays to look carefully, because it can be hard to distinguish a one-page book review from a thirty page article, though each costs £5 ($11.50 CDN) to download. Readers with online access to good university libraries, such as that of the U of S, will already have access to most online articles free of charge, and to interlibrary loan services to gather most of the others. Where time is of the essence, however, or where electronic access to a research library is lacking, the B.L. system may prove very useful. Check it out at http://direct.bl.uk/.

The ever-expanding empire that is Amazon.com, however, now offers downloadable journal articles as well. The selection is vast, though probably not as vast as the British Library offerings. If you must pay for an article download, however, Amazon is at $5.95 US ($7.50 CDN). As with so much of what makes Amazon.com great, this particular service is not available from Amazon.ca (not that the latter isn't sometimes cheaper, all things considered, if they happen to have the item).