ARCHIVES AND INDEXES
General --
Foreign Language --
Specialty
There's a vast range of online literature beyond what we index individually
on The Online Books Page. Below we list some of the major sources and
indexes of free online texts, in all languages, both general and specialized.
These are large, general-purpose collections with substantial English-language
listings. For archives that mainly carry other languages, see the
foreign languages archive listings.
We break these out into categories:
Large-scale repositories --
Significant indexes and search aids --
Significant smaller-scale archives
These are big collections of texts, big enough to act as small library-like
collections in their own right. The threshold for inclusion here may rise
over time. Listed alphabetically.
-
Google Book Search (page images of 1,000,000+ fully readable public domain books, plus many more copyrighted books available via excerpts and snippets):
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Internet Archive Open Access Texts (1,000,000+ items, page images and some transcriptions)
-
Hathi Trust (350,000+ public domain items from Google and elsewhere)
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Project Gutenberg (over 27,000 items, mostly book transcriptions)
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University of Michigan Digital General Collection (page images from 28,000+ books scanned for preservation purposes)
The sites below primarily provide
search engines, indexes or useful link lists for finding online books.
Everything else we see worth listing that doesn't fit in
more specialized categories.
Tyler Chambers's iLoveLanguages site
has a comprehensive listing of foreign language and
literature resources. The University of Virginia's
Western European Literature listing also lists a number of major
collections in languages other than English. For text and teaching materials
in less common languages, see UCLA's Language Materials Project.
See also these archives:
These are listed by category:
Academic Presses --
Agriculture --
Architecture --
Art and Crafts --
Audio --
Blacks --
Books, Printing, and Publishing --
Children --
Computing --
Dissertations --
Drama --
Economics --
Historical --
Home Economics --
Literary --
Military --
Music and Dance --
New Original Works --
Philosophy --
Poetry --
Politics, Government, Law --
Portable Reader Editions --
Regional --
Religion --
Science, Technology, Social Science and Math --
Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror --
Serials --
Sports, Games and Recreation --
Textbooks and Instructional Materials --
Women
The following presses have put a substantial number of free online books
on their site.
This section includes general or wide-area historical archives and
indexes. For sites that focus on a particular country, state, or
region, see the regional section.
See also historical (for literature from a
certain period),
and new original works (for web-published literature)
and poetry.
For literary criticism, the Internet Public Library's
Online Literary Criticism
Collection is a good starting point.
These archives have substantial collections of material that has been first
published
first on the Net, or that appeared on the Web shortly after their
original publication. See also
the Open Directory's Online Writing links, which include
pointers to many such archives, large and small, of varying quality.
- Manybooks.net (over 10,000 titles formatted for PDAs and Web browsers)
- Microsoft Reader Free eBooks (for PocketPC and Windows platforms; for-pay books also offered)
- PalmPilot E-Text Ring (80+ sites featuring free or for-pay texts formatted for Palm readers)
- Qvadis Library (free texts in proprietary Palm format; requires purchase of reader software)
- A few sites make many of their titles available in popular formats
for portable devices, as well as standard Web formats. Notable sites in this category include
the Baen Free Library.
Books concerning various regions can also be found
in general resources in the historical section.