I have scanned the entirety of Arthur Vogel's Practical Organic Chemistry, 3rd edition, and converted it into a PDF with bookmarks for each section. It is not as compact or convenient as an OCR'd copy (you cannot search for arbitrary terms within the text), but you should be fine if you print out the table of contents and have it handy. I originally scanned the book at 600 DPI and tried to do OCR on that, but Abbyy Finereader, although a good program, doesn't deal well with chemical/technical symbols. If you have an OCR program that you think might do a better job, contact me privately and I'll arrange a transfer of the original 600 DPI TIFF files. The version presented here is 300 DPI.
This book was first published in 1956, and in my estimation that's plenty old enough to be in the public domain, especially since this particular edition will never again be printed. The law and copyright holder may not agree with me though, so this download will be active for only about a week. After that, it's up to you to keep this book available somewhere out there. Put it on Usenet binary groups, private FTP servers, Freenet, wherever people can get it. Feel free to clean it up, modify it, or convert it into other formats. I believe that I am the first to make and circulate an e-book of this particular text, but if not I only wasted a week.
I am going to be traveling and mostly offline starting this Friday and lasting for about a week, so don't get antsy if I seem unresponsive.
The PDF is wrapped in a zip file to prevent browser plugins from triggering and trying to just display the book onscreen. Download, then read. If you're on a dialup connection I highly recommend that you use a program such as GetRight to ensure that you are able to get this large (66 megabyte) file even if you are interrupted halfway through.
Now, after all the preamble, the file:
http://bcis.pacificu.edu/~polverone/practical-organic-chem.zip
19th century digital boy