Some Free Online Books!
Aug. 21st, 2024 12:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
joshwritingThis is edited from a Facebook Note that I first crafted in 2018 and then edited in 2020. FB no longer allows old Notes to be edited, so the list is migrating here, with additional edits as people insist on having their websites change! (See also: Facebook.)
Suggestions for additions, edits, and deletions are welcome! So is sharing this page.
1.http://www.schulers.com/books/author_index.htm Closed. But instead go to:
https://web.archive.org/web/20191103175757/http://schulers.com/books/author_index.htm
Note: I have this set to the alphabetical Authors catalog, but it is alphabetical by author's first name! Also, punctuation comes ahead of letters, so (H)erbert (G)eorge Wells comes well ahead of H. G. Wells and Wells, H. G. does not exist at all. It is a little sloppy, so W. D. Howells, W.D. Howells, and William D. Howells are eaach listed separately, two different titles for each name. There is also an index by title, but I haven't explored it.
2. http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page - the largest repository of free books
3.http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/meta/authors.html -
NOTE: This site is officially closed. They mention a few other sites, all of which are here. But what they do not mention is that their site is at the Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20190410170409/http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/meta/authors.html - This won't always let you read some of their links online, but it does seem to allow downloads for those books that are theirs (blue open book icon), in Mobi (Kindle) and Epub formats, among others. They also have live links to other titles --> the red quarish icon goes to the Internet Archive or Gutenberg.
4. https://www.library.virginia.edu/libra/ - Libra is the University of Virginia’s scholarly institutional repository: This is their "online archive of scholarship created by the University community" Theses, Datasets, and more. While the theses and datasets are not open, the theses let you see their abstracts which then enables you to hunt them down.
5. http://books.google.com - but one has to be careful to select "full text" or one gets a lot of extraneous works
6. https://www.doaks.org/resources/rare-books - "Access full digital facsimiles of select titles in the Rare Book Collection, relating to Byzantine, Garden and Landscape, and Pre-Columbian Studies, through this searchable resource." The website also has some other online collections:
https://www.doaks.org/resources/online-exhibits - Coins, architecture, and much more!
https://www.doaks.org/resources/autograph-letter-collection - Autograph letters from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cultural notables.
https://www.doaks.org/resources/moche-iconography - The Moche culture (200–900 CE) is recognized as one of the first complex societies of the desert North Coast of Peru. (Spanish version available.)
7. https://www.baen.com/allbooks/category/index/id/2012 - Baen is a publisher of Science Fiction and Fantasy titles. This is a collection of more than 70 free science fiction and fantasy novels, anthologies, and non-fiction about SF & F. New titles get added sporadically.
8. https://dl.acm.org/acmbooks - This is the Digital Library of the Association for Computing Machinery. The link is to their collection of computer books, but they also have journals, magazines, and more. Total holdings in the tens of thousands. A search on "gifted" and "students" pulled up more than 14,000 entries, most of which are open access or free.
9. https://dp.la/ - The Digital Public Library of America "Discover 51,028,894 images, texts, videos, and sounds from across the United States." They have a section explicitly providing access to banned books!
Also: https://dp.la/exhibitions - Stories of national significance drawn from source materials in libraries, archives, and museums across the United States.
10. https://shiplib.org/ - The Nautical Archaeology Digital Library - Shipwreck databases, treatises on ship building, models, and artifacts!
11. https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/home - The CIA's Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room - former classified docs and so much more. Newest collection: Nixon!
12. https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/browse/collections - The Biodiversity Heritage Library - 57 collections from cats to flowers to monsters
13. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/ - The New York Public Library's digital collection: 893,593 items digitized with "new materials added every day, featuring prints, photographs, maps, manuscripts, streaming video, and more."
14. http://www.getty.edu/publications/virtuallibrary/ - Getty Publications Virtual Library: "More than 300 of our books to read and download for free"
15. https://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/index.html - History of Medicine Division at the National Library of Medicine: "Digital materials related to health and disease. Through its online resources, patrons can view the earliest anatomical drawings, read about the history of forensic medicine and explore an exhibition dedicated to the accomplishments of women physicians."
--> They also have https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/ - Digital Collections: "The National Library of Medicine's free online repository of biomedical resources including books, manuscripts, still images, videos, and maps." At the bottom of this page they have other digital offerings, including Profiles in Science, with a look at more than forty 20th century individuals and a link to a collection of Visual Culture and Health Posters.
16. http://en.childrenslibrary.org/ - The International Children's Digital Library: 4619 books in 60+ languages. There used to be instructions for the site in 16 languages. but I cannot find it currently.
More on audio books!
a good source for new fantasy short fiction:
17. http://podcastle.org/ - Their works run from roughly 5 minutes to 45 or 50, to my experience.
18. http://escapepod.org/ - This is the equivalent site to Pod Castle, but on the other side of the fantasy/SF split.
19. http://www.starshipsofa.com/ is "The Audio Science Fiction Magazine."
You can find a large number of pieces of various lengths by going to:
20. http://www.freesfonline.de
Using http://www.freesfonline.de/AdvancedSearch.html allows some good esoteric options. In the Format section, click on everything but the headphones. Then, below, in Date of Addition, click on "Any." Then start the search! That will give you the first 50 of 3071 they have - through Brin. If you narrow the search, it will give you different parts of the 3071.
Another place to find such things is athardsf.org
21. https://web.archive.org/web/20160120060359/http://hardsf.org/
These list individual works that are read aloud, whether short story or novel.
Authors A-F - https://web.archive.org/web/20120922005307/http://www.hardsf.org/HSF0Sto1.htm
Authors G-0 - https://web.archive.org/web/20120922005307/http://www.hardsf.org/HSF0Sto2.htm
Authors P-Z - https://web.archive.org/web/20120922005307/http://www.hardsf.org/HSF0Sto3.htm
On the left side of those pages are various podcasts. I have not checked to see if they are viable either in or out of the Internet Archive, but it is worth copying the link and pasting it in its own url.
They also have some SF Drama, theoretically, but I am not getting much joy from the links at the moment.
You can also browse through
22. http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=fantasy%20AND%20collection%3Aaudio_bookspoetry%20AND%20subject%3A%22fantasy%22
Lots of cool stuff there. Those were aimed at SF/Fantasy.
23. More generally, you can have a look at:http://librivox.org/
24. http://www.openculture.com/freeaudiobooks
25. (really 2a) http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:The_Audio_Books_Project
26. For German speakers: http://www.vorleser.net/
For many languages, the Internet Archive (archive.org), Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.org), the International Children's Digital Library (icdl.org) and others above all have books in languages other than English.
Suggestions for additions, edits, and deletions are welcome! So is sharing this page.
1.
https://web.archive.org/web/20191103175757/http://schulers.com/books/author_index.htm
Note: I have this set to the alphabetical Authors catalog, but it is alphabetical by author's first name! Also, punctuation comes ahead of letters, so (H)erbert (G)eorge Wells comes well ahead of H. G. Wells and Wells, H. G. does not exist at all. It is a little sloppy, so W. D. Howells, W.D. Howells, and William D. Howells are eaach listed separately, two different titles for each name. There is also an index by title, but I haven't explored it.
2. http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page - the largest repository of free books
3.
NOTE: This site is officially closed. They mention a few other sites, all of which are here. But what they do not mention is that their site is at the Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20190410170409/http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/meta/authors.html - This won't always let you read some of their links online, but it does seem to allow downloads for those books that are theirs (blue open book icon), in Mobi (Kindle) and Epub formats, among others. They also have live links to other titles --> the red quarish icon goes to the Internet Archive or Gutenberg.
4. https://www.library.virginia.edu/libra/ - Libra is the University of Virginia’s scholarly institutional repository: This is their "online archive of scholarship created by the University community" Theses, Datasets, and more. While the theses and datasets are not open, the theses let you see their abstracts which then enables you to hunt them down.
5. http://books.google.com - but one has to be careful to select "full text" or one gets a lot of extraneous works
6. https://www.doaks.org/resources/rare-books - "Access full digital facsimiles of select titles in the Rare Book Collection, relating to Byzantine, Garden and Landscape, and Pre-Columbian Studies, through this searchable resource." The website also has some other online collections:
https://www.doaks.org/resources/online-exhibits - Coins, architecture, and much more!
https://www.doaks.org/resources/autograph-letter-collection - Autograph letters from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cultural notables.
https://www.doaks.org/resources/moche-iconography - The Moche culture (200–900 CE) is recognized as one of the first complex societies of the desert North Coast of Peru. (Spanish version available.)
7. https://www.baen.com/allbooks/category/index/id/2012 - Baen is a publisher of Science Fiction and Fantasy titles. This is a collection of more than 70 free science fiction and fantasy novels, anthologies, and non-fiction about SF & F. New titles get added sporadically.
8. https://dl.acm.org/acmbooks - This is the Digital Library of the Association for Computing Machinery. The link is to their collection of computer books, but they also have journals, magazines, and more. Total holdings in the tens of thousands. A search on "gifted" and "students" pulled up more than 14,000 entries, most of which are open access or free.
9. https://dp.la/ - The Digital Public Library of America "Discover 51,028,894 images, texts, videos, and sounds from across the United States." They have a section explicitly providing access to banned books!
Also: https://dp.la/exhibitions - Stories of national significance drawn from source materials in libraries, archives, and museums across the United States.
10. https://shiplib.org/ - The Nautical Archaeology Digital Library - Shipwreck databases, treatises on ship building, models, and artifacts!
11. https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/home - The CIA's Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room - former classified docs and so much more. Newest collection: Nixon!
12. https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/browse/collections - The Biodiversity Heritage Library - 57 collections from cats to flowers to monsters
13. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/ - The New York Public Library's digital collection: 893,593 items digitized with "new materials added every day, featuring prints, photographs, maps, manuscripts, streaming video, and more."
14. http://www.getty.edu/publications/virtuallibrary/ - Getty Publications Virtual Library: "More than 300 of our books to read and download for free"
15. https://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/index.html - History of Medicine Division at the National Library of Medicine: "Digital materials related to health and disease. Through its online resources, patrons can view the earliest anatomical drawings, read about the history of forensic medicine and explore an exhibition dedicated to the accomplishments of women physicians."
--> They also have https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/ - Digital Collections: "The National Library of Medicine's free online repository of biomedical resources including books, manuscripts, still images, videos, and maps." At the bottom of this page they have other digital offerings, including Profiles in Science, with a look at more than forty 20th century individuals and a link to a collection of Visual Culture and Health Posters.
16. http://en.childrenslibrary.org/ - The International Children's Digital Library: 4619 books in 60+ languages. There used to be instructions for the site in 16 languages. but I cannot find it currently.
More on audio books!
a good source for new fantasy short fiction:
17. http://podcastle.org/ - Their works run from roughly 5 minutes to 45 or 50, to my experience.
18. http://escapepod.org/ - This is the equivalent site to Pod Castle, but on the other side of the fantasy/SF split.
19. http://www.starshipsofa.com/ is "The Audio Science Fiction Magazine."
You can find a large number of pieces of various lengths by going to:
20. http://www.freesfonline.de
Using http://www.freesfonline.de/AdvancedSearch.html allows some good esoteric options. In the Format section, click on everything but the headphones. Then, below, in Date of Addition, click on "Any." Then start the search! That will give you the first 50 of 3071 they have - through Brin. If you narrow the search, it will give you different parts of the 3071.
Another place to find such things is at
21. https://web.archive.org/web/20160120060359/http://hardsf.org/
These list individual works that are read aloud, whether short story or novel.
Authors A-F - https://web.archive.org/web/20120922005307/http://www.hardsf.org/HSF0Sto1.htm
Authors G-0 - https://web.archive.org/web/20120922005307/http://www.hardsf.org/HSF0Sto2.htm
Authors P-Z - https://web.archive.org/web/20120922005307/http://www.hardsf.org/HSF0Sto3.htm
On the left side of those pages are various podcasts. I have not checked to see if they are viable either in or out of the Internet Archive, but it is worth copying the link and pasting it in its own url.
They also have some SF Drama, theoretically, but I am not getting much joy from the links at the moment.
You can also browse through
22. http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=fantasy%20AND%20collection%3Aaudio_bookspoetry%20AND%20subject%3A%22fantasy%22
Lots of cool stuff there. Those were aimed at SF/Fantasy.
23. More generally, you can have a look at:http://librivox.org/
24. http://www.openculture.com/freeaudiobooks
25. (really 2a) http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:The_Audio_Books_Project
26. For German speakers: http://www.vorleser.net/
For many languages, the Internet Archive (archive.org), Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.org), the International Children's Digital Library (icdl.org) and others above all have books in languages other than English.
