Here is a list of sites where you can find free books online. There are few books that you can’t find on bittorrent, eMule, or IRC these days, but some people still like to get their reading legitimately. Despite the fact that most public domain books are ancient, there is still more than a few evenings’ worth of great reading hidden in this list. If you think of another I should add or a link goes dead, leave a comment.
Amatuer Fiction
Elfwood – A collection of amateur writing, focusing on the Fantasy genre. The site is poorly organized, but the quantity more than makes up for having to wade through all of it.
Fiction Press – Host to all genres of amateur, self-submitted works.
Computer Text
Atari – Vintage computer texts.
Bhargav Bhatt’s Book Archive – A collection of freely available texts on computer science, math, and physics collected from around the web.
Bruce Eckel’s Free Electronic Books – Downloads of Eckel’s books: “Thinking in C++”, “Thinking in C#”, “Thinking in Java”, and “Thinking in Patterns.”
Classic Texts in Computer Science – A collection of computer science texts, such as “The UNIX Time-Sharing System” by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson and “Growing a Language” Guy Lewis Steele Jr.
Free Computer Texts – Free computer and math books, tutorials, and lecture notes.
The Free Country – Free tutorials, references, and programming guides for your programming language. This page lists such free programming documentation which you can either read online or download and read offline.
Handbook of Applied Cryptography – A now old cryptography text by Alfred J. Menezes, Paul C. van Oorschot and Scott A. Vanstone.
O’Reilly Open Books Project – All types of technical guides, copyright free.
Directories
2020ok – A massive directory of e-texts in a wide variety of genres.
Fiction
Baen Free Library – An very small collection of mediocre fiction that you have to register to read. Beware their spamming!!!
Munseys – HTML versions of many, many public domain works.
Page by Page books – More free works of fiction
Pink Monkey – Classic public domain fiction chosen for its readablity, unlike other sites. Selections like Alice in Wonderland, Dracula, and Treasure Island.
Geek Culture
Free Culture – Lawrence Lessig’s ranting history of the man keeping us down through copyright laws.
The Hacker Crackdown – The original book by Bruce Sterling.
Individual Books
A Place So Foreign (and eight more) by Cory Doctorow
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow
Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow
The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect – a science fiction novel by Roger Williams.
Large-Scale Academic Projects
Arthur Wendover – a collection of HTML-marked up free books, most from Gutenberg.
The Bralyn Archives – a site aimed at collecting works for nonprofit, educational purposes.
English Server – an e-publishing co-op based at Iowa State University where hundreds of writers, editors and scholars gather to publish over 35,000 works free of charge.
Hanover’s excellent guide – an historical etext archive
A Liberal Education for the Rest of Us – a short list of classic texts that you might run accross in your college years, such as Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave.”
The Newton Project. – This Project aims to create a printed edition of Newton’s theological, alchemical and administrative writings and an electronic edition of all his writings, including his correspondence.
The Oxford Text Archive (OTA) – A collection of public domain and free-for-noncommercial use texts. A little confusing on the licensing front, but a nice resource nonetheless. The collection contains most of the classics, along with texts for members of the Arts and Humanities academic community.
The Perseus Digital Library. An excellent collection of Classics (Greek and Roman), Papyri, certain Renaissance works, and others. Freely accessible, but unfortunately, they claim the copyright on their labours.
The University of Virginia etext Library- A really excellent site – far more browsable than other sites, such as project Gutenberg.
Project Gutenberg
BookRags – Gutenberg etexts in an html format.
Project Gutenberg – I don’t think this site needs an introduction, being the largest source of public domain texts on the Internet.
Project Gutenberg of Australia – In Australia (as in Canada), works enter into the public domain only 50 years after an author’s death, with very few exceptions. This means, among other things, the complete works of H.G. Wells, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and George Orwell are public domain in these countries.
Gutenberg at HTML Writers’ Guild – an abandoned project to mark up Project Gutenberg texts in XML or XHTML for easier reading.
GutenMark – a tool for automatically creating high-quality HTML or LaTeX markup from Project Gutenberg etexts. In combination with other freely-available conversion tools, GutenMark can convert Project Gutenberg etexts into publication-quality Postscript or PDF, for print-on-demand applications. The goal is for this conversion is completely automatic, without manual markup or editing.
Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders project – One of the coolest Internet applications I’ve seen in a long time. Distributed Proofreaders provides a web-based method to ease the conversion of Public Domain books into e-books. By dividing the workload into individual pages, many volunteers can work on a book at the same time, which significantly speeds up the creation process. Pop by and proofread a few pages in your spare time.
Reference
Bartleby.com – A comprehensive collection of reference material (and more). Though free to access, this material may not be reproduced.
The DICT Development Group – Protocols and resources for online dictionaries. Includes an excellent summary of freely available dictionary files.
The Elements of Style – The classic guide by William Strunk, Jr.
Religion and Occult
The Hermetic Library – A small archive of occult books.
Hermetics Resource Site – An archive of occult books.
Internet Sacred Text Archive – The largest freely available archive of online books about religion, mythology, folklore and the esoteric on the Internet. I never had much use for this site, until I stumbled upon The Magus by Francis Barrett. It’s the grimoire that has been the primary source for the study of ceremonial magic for the past two centuries. If you’re at all interested in writing (or even reading) fantasy literature, this book is going to the source of endless inspiration for you.
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