Mary, If you want to copy something from Google books, there's a selection on the right-hand side that will let you select plain text or the page images. Note: this text is OCR'ed and occasionally garbles things or loses lines, so if you use this, do proofread it by comparing your copied text with the page image. Also, trying to copy more than one page of text at a time can create errors, so copy in smaller chunks. Liz J