LibGuides: Free Ebook Collections: Home

Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences Free Ebooks Collections

'Art of the avant-garde in Russia' by Margit Rowell and Angelica Zander Rudenstine- From the Archives (Guggenheim)
Bartleby The full text of many classic literary works, including Shakespeare.
Bible Gateway The full text of approximately 100 versions of the Bible in 54 languages.
Blake Archive This archive contains electronic copies of William Blake’s illuminated books, as well as a number of his illustrations, drawings, paintings and manuscript works.
CARRIE This full-text electronic library hosted by the European University Institute in Italy, contains digitised primary documents as well as ebooks in history.
Cascadilla Proceedings Project Linguistics conference proceedings from Cascadilla Press.
Chinese Literature classics A range of classical Chinese literature in English and a variety of Chinese language formats.
Christian Classics Ethereal Library A digital library of hundreds of Christian books, including 42 Bibles in various languages.
Etext Center University of Virginia Library Contains English literature collections. Some are only available to University of Virginia users, but others such as Modern English and Middle English collections are publicly available.
Film Studies for Free A list of open access ebooks on film studies.
From the Archives (Guggenheim) From the Archives (Guggenheim) – This site from the Guggenheim has 65 free exhibition catalogues, including exhibitions on artists such as Francis Bacon and Kandinsky, as well as movements and themes.
Gaia (University of California) A collection of 28 open access books on global, international and area studies.
Gallica This site from the Bibliothque Nationale de France allows access to thousands of digitised books, mostly in French.
HSRC Press South African open access publisher in social science. The Press publishes the research output of the Human Science Research Council and externally authored works. Many titles are free to download.
Literature Project Collection of full-text books, poems, plays and speeches.
Making of America (Cornell University) A digital library for American social history containing 267 digitised books from the 19th century, but focusing mostly on serials.
Making of America (Michigan University) A digital library for American social history containing approximately 1,600 digitised books from 1850-1877.
ManyBooks Classic texts can be downloaded to a range of formats including for a variety of ebook readers. New titles are added regularly and an RSS feed is available for new additions.
Open Book Publishers An independent academic publisher in Humanities and Social Sciences. Many of their books are available to read for free online.
Open SUNY Textbooks An open access textbook publishing initiative established by State University of New York libraries. The textbooks are fully downloadable and cover subjects in Arts & Humanities, Social Sciences, Sciences and Technology.
Oxford Text Archive The archive holds several thousand electronic texts and linguistics corpora, in a variety of languages. Includes online versions of works by individual authors, standard reference works and a range of language corpora.
Page by Page Books Offers public domain ebooks to read online, presented as a series of web pages, so that individual pages can be bookmarked.
Penn State Romance Studies An open access peer-reviewed monograph series in the languages, literatures, and cultures of the Romance languages.
Perseus Digital Library A searchable and browsable collection of ebooks. The largest collections are classics and 19th century American studies, but other collections include Arabic, Germanic and Renaissance materials
Society of Antiquities of Scotland As well as conference proceedings, the site provides access to out-of-print titles in this archaeological monograph series.
University of Virginia Press: Rotunda The Founders Early Access collection offers free full text to unpublished documents from the founders of the United States. These documents may change as further editorial work is undertaken, and once a document is published, it is removed from this site.
Victorian Prose Archive A collection of texts of scholarly interest by eight Victorian authors, including Matthew Arnold and Oscar Wilde.
Read Print The classics available online.

Individual titles:

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. An open access dynamic philosophy reference resource maintained by experts in the field.
Atanas Tane Naumovski. Lerin in Mourning. Pollitecon Publications, 2007. Translated by Elizabeth Kolupacev Stewart, This title names and commemorates 2,056 Macedonian fighters who died for Macedonian freedom in the Greek Civil War. It is available to read online or to download as a PDF.
Mario Arturo Ruiz Estrada, An introduction to econographicology, Mario Arturo Ruiz Estrada, 2012 An academic at the University of Malaya has made this ebook freely available.
Peter Saunders, Social mobility myths, Civitas, 2010. This book is freely available from the Institute of Civil Society's website.

Multidisciplinary Free Ebooks Collections

There are many scholarly and popular resources for eBooks and Audiobooks available for free on the web. Take a look at those we've gathered here.

American Memory This historical collection includes 1,500 nineteenth century American ebooks in several subject areas.
The Assayer The Assayer is the web's largest catalog of books whose authors have made them available for free. Users can also submit reviews. The site has been around since 2000, and is a particularly good place to find free books about math, science, and computers.
Bookboon Over 500 downloadable textbooks, mainly in the areas of Business/Economics, Engineering, Natural Sciences and IT, are available from this publisher of free ebooks.
Bookserver (Internet Archive) A project of the Internet Archive. Access ebooks via the search box. Includes out-of-copyright texts from Project Gutenberg among other collections.
British Library “Turning the pages” Facsimiles of a selection of books from the British Library’s collection are available, with software that can turn virtual pages. Alternative static versions are also available.
Chicago University Press free monthly ebook A different ebook is available free each month from Chicago University Press.
Cornell University Library Historical Monographs Collection A collection of selected monographs with expired copyrights chosen from a variety of disciplines.
Digital Book Index This index provides links to more than 165,000 ebooks covering a variety of subjects. Over 140,000 of these are free. The index can be searched and browsed.
Digital Library of India Contains ebooks, ejournals and digitised manuscripts, predominantly in Indian languages.
DOAB: Directory of Open Access Books Contains 1265 academic peer-reviewed books from 35 publishers, indcluding several university presses.
E-Books Directory A growing list of freely downloadable ebooks, documents and lecture notes. It is possible to search, browse by subject and see recently added or most popular titles.
ebooks@Adelaide Collection of classic works including literature, philosophy, science, religion and history. Note these are published as new editions, with no attempt to retain pagination of print copies.
eLibrary e-Library includes 9,585 ebooks to download in 91 categories
Flat World Knowledge A collection of textbooks that are free to read on screen, although they are not free to print. Follow the links from ‘catalog’ to access the ebooks.
Global Text Project A collection of undergraduate e-textbooks available under a creative commons licence in business, computing, education, health, science and social science.
Google Books Out-of-copyright books can be viewed online, and those in the public domain can be downloaded and saved.
HathiTrust HathiTrust — A collaborative repository from US research libraries, containing over 10 million digitised volumes. Not all are freely accessible, however over 2.5 million public domain digitised works can be downloaded.
Internet Archive Text Archive - Contains a wide range of fiction, popular books, children's books, historical texts and academic books.
ipl2 (Internet Public Library) 45000+ full text works, fiction and non-fiction plus online reference works. Divided into subject collections for easy browsing but also fully searchable
Many Books Search Over 33,000 Free Ebooks.
Münchener Digitalisierungszentrum Digitale Bibliothek Important rare books resource based mainly on the collections of the Bavarian State Library.
OAPEN Library (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) A multidisciplinary Open Access library of 860+ titles from European publishers freely available as PDF files, including titles in several languages. Includes 30 titles from UK publishers under the OAPEN-UK JISC ebooks project.
Ohio State University Press Offers open access to a range of scholarly texts, particularly in literature and history.
Online Books Page A regularly updated listing of over 1 million ebooks that are freely readable over the internet, maintained by the University of Pennsylvania Library.
Open Access Textbooks The Resources tab contains links to websites that provide open access textbooks.
Open Library A project of the Internet Archive, provides records for 20 million books, and access to 1.7 million scanned books. The search can be limited to ebooks only.
Project Gutenberg A fully searchable collection of 18000+ multilanguage eBooks. Many classic titles and other formats such as audio books. It has a fully searchable online catalogue.
Questia Over 5,000 classic and rare books available to read online for free.
University of Adelaide Press The University of Adelaide’s Barr Smith Library has established a digital Press with an electronic edition of each new book published as well as print. The electronic editions are Open Access and free, in PDF format. There are currently 17 titles.
University of Arizona Press Offers 13 titles which are free to read online, mainly in astronomy, archaeology and anthropology.
University of California Press Over 500 titles from UCP’s Scholarship Editions are available to the public. These include books on art, science, history, music, religion and fiction. Over 500 titles from UCP’s Scholarship Editions are available to the public. These include books on art, science, history, music, religion and fiction.
University of Pittsburgh Press A multidisciplinary collection of over 750 monographs are available on open access.
Wikibooks Multidisciplinary open-content textbooks, which can be edited by anyone. Many books are incomplete, however featured books are those that have been considered by the community to represent the best quality wikibooks.
Wikisource - Multidisciplinary open-content ebook library, which can be edited by anyone. These texts are available in many languages, and in translation, as well as in comic, film and audiobook form.
World Digital Library A collection of many maps, images, audio, writings from all over the world, organized by location, decade, author, and subject.

Popular eAudiobook Collections

AudioBooksForFree Offers free MP3 downloads of audio books listed by Genres. Registration may be required.
LibriVox LibriVox is an online digital library of free public domain audiobooks, read by volunteers.
Open Culture Download Free Audio Books of great works by Twain, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Orwell, Vonnegut, Nietzsche, Austen, Shakespeare, Asimov, HG Wells & more.
Project Gutenberg Audio Book Project Offers Human or computer generated readers in many languages.

Children's Literature

A Apple Pie by Kate Greenaway. London; New York: F. Warne, [1900].
Page Turner - PDF (8.14MB) Bibliographic Information

Aaron Shepard's World of Stories "Here are folktales, fairy tales, tall tales, myths, legends, magical tales, and sacred stories, plus original fables, humor, fantasy, and historical fiction—all from award-winning author Aaron Shepard. Most of the stories have been published in top children’s magazines like Cricket and Australia’s School Magazine, while some are from Aaron’s picture books and early readers."
Aesop's Fables "Our online collection of Aesop's Fables includes a total of 655+ Fables, indexed in table format, with morals listed. There are many more on the way. Most were translated into English by Rev. George Fyler Townsend (1814-1900) and Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) the rest are from Jean De La Fontaine in French and translated to English by several good internet souls. Included are Real Audio narrations, Classic Images, Random Images, Random Fables, Search Engine and much more on the way. Recently added are 127 Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen."
Baldwin's Library of Children's Literature: Digital Collection The Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature in the Department of Special Collections at the University of Florida's George A. Smathers Libraries contains more than 100,000 volumes published in Great Britain and the United States from the early 1700s through the current year. Its holdings of more than 800 early American imprints is the second largest such collection in the United States.
byGosh Books Online http://bygosh.com/
Children's Books in the Library of Congress Rare Books & Special Collections Digitized collection of children's books from the Library of Congress Rare Books & Special Collections.
Children's poems from the Poetry Foundation Focusing on children and poetry, this area of the larger organization provides resources for parents and teachers to cultivate in children a lifelong love of poetry.
Hans Christian Andersen: Fairy Tales & Stories Andersen’s tales in full-text.
International Children's Digital Library Free access to high-quality digital books from around the world. Browse by age, genre, book length, character types, or even the color of a book's cover.
Literature for Children Collection "Literature for Children is a collection of the treasures of children's literature published largely in the United States and Great Britain from before 1850 to beyond 1950. At the core of this Collection are books from the Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature, housed in the Department of Special Collections and Area Studies at the University of Florida. Books from the Departments of Special Collections at the Florida Atlantic University, Florida State University, and the University of South Florida join volumes from the Baldwin Library to complete the Collection. The foundation for this Collection was a cataloging and preservation microfilming project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The NEH project included a digital color management strategy for the reproduction of illustrations as children saw them."
Project Gutenberg's Children's Bookshelf Collection of illustrated antique books online
Storynory Free to use audio book site tailored specifically for children., providing a plethora of original stories as well as classical fairy tales and short novels
SurLaLune Fairy Tales Features annotated fairy tales, including histories, interpretations, and illustrations.

Science, Technology & Medicine Free Ebooks Collections

Open Book Project A computer science textbook and series on electricity and electronics are available, as well as tutorials and courses.
Botanicus A freely accessible portal to historic botanical literature from the Missouri Botanical Garden Library. Currently includes over 1000 titles (books and journals) with an RSS feed available for recent additions. Images are free for non-commercial use
FreeBooks4Doctors This site provides access to 360 free medical books.
InTech A multidisciplinary Open Access publisher of books and journals covering the fields of Science, Technology and Medicine with over 2000 ebooks available to date.
MSRI Books A series of Mathematical Sciences Research Institute Pulications from Cambridge University Press. The full text of new books is available a few months after publication.
National Academies Press Over 4000 titles from the US National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council are available to download. The free pdfs are available exclusively from the NAP site and remain subject to copyright laws.
NCBI Bookshelf National Center for Biotechnology Information’s Bookshelf site provides free access to books and documents in life science and healthcare.
O'Reilly Open Books Project A collection of free ebooks in computer science.

Individual titles:

Anna Mieczakowski & John Clarkson, Ageing, adaption and accessibility: time for the inclusive revolution!, Engineering Design Centre, 2012. The Engineering Design Centre at the University of Cambridge produced a book of thought pieces investigating why we continue to digitally disfranchise older people in the modern era.
Aya Homei & Michael Worboys. Fungal disease in Britain and the United Statues 1850-2000: mycoses and modernity. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Palgrave Macmillan's first publsihed open access monograph, funded by The Wellcome Trust.
David J.C. MacKay, Sustainable energy : without the hot air, IUT Cambridge Ltd, 2009. This book by an academic from the Physics Department at University of Cambridge discusses options for sustainable energy.
S.L. Altmann & P. Herzig, Point-group theory tables (2nd ed.), S.L. Altmann & P. Herzig, 2011. The second edition of this book corrects ten errors made in the first edition that is held by some Cambridge libraries. It has been digitised by the University of Vienna.
Steve Dinh, Narrative approaches to the international mathematical problems, Authorhouse, 2012. This book contains mathematical problems and solutions found in the Mathematical Olympiad competitions.