Research Guides: Books & eBooks: Free eBook Collections

Multi-Subject Free eBook Sites

Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)
Primary aim is to increase discoverability of Open Access books.
Internet Archive
Collection ranges from alternative news programming, to Grateful Dead concerts, to Old Time Radio shows, to book and poetry recordings, to original music contributed by users. Includes non-English audio options.
Google Books
Find full-text ebooks and periodicals from major libraries and other contributors as well as books with only partial views or basic bibliographic information supplied. Limit search to "Full View only" in the "Advanced Search" mode (link supplied above.) Stunningly useful for such uses as unearthing elusive bibliographic references and uncovering snippets of information from even partial view materials.
HathiTrust
Conceived as a collaboration of the thirteen universities of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation and the University of California system to establish a repository for these universities to archive and share digitized collections, including books, journals, and more. This impressive collection, with all legally eligible texts open to the public, contains millions of titles. HathiTrust public domain content is discoverable through the Auraria Library's home page search box.
Digital Book Index
This index is intended as a "Meta-index" since it searches most major ebook sites as well as thousands of smaller specialized sites. Some sites offer ebooks for free and some for sale. You have to log in - but it's worth it.
Feedbooks.com
Free ebooks in the public domain and original books from new authors. The site also sells ebooks.
ManyBooks.net
A million+ free ebooks compatible with many reading devices.
Online Books Page
Maintained by the University of Pennsylvania Library with many millions of free ebooks available!
Project Gutenberg
This collection is the first major free ebook web site, begun in 1971, well before the Web was born! It's still a growing and vibrant site. The founder, Michael S. Hart, signs his writings "Founder, Project Gutenberg, Inventor of ebooks."
ReadPrint
Read, recommend, and discuss books on this social ebook site.
Unglue.it
Authors offer their books digitally after receiving target pledge money they specify.
University of Pittsburgh Press Digital Editions
Find over 700 scholarly open access titles.
Bartleby: Great Books Online
Presents free literature, reference, and verse ebooks. Standard reference books on the web including American Heritage Dictionary, Roget's II Thesaurus, Bartlett's Quotations, the King James Bible, Oxford Shakespeare, Gray's Anatomy, Strunk's Elements of Style, World Fact Book, and the Columbia Encyclopedia and Gazetteer.
Standard eBooks
"A volunteer driven, not-for-profit effort to produce a collection of high quality, carefully formatted, accessible, open source, and free public domain ebooks that meet or exceed the quality of commercially produced ebooks."

Digital Repositories

An avalanche of materials continue to be digitized and made available at no charge, including ebooks, art, historic documents, journal articles, current writings, photographs, and more. The repositories below help unearth items pertinent to most topics.

OpenDOAR
A directory of open access academic repositories offering a wide range of text, media, and audio materials in digital format including oral history collections.
Online Public Access (OPA)
Simultaneously search multiple online resources from the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, NARA.
Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)
The Digital Public Library of America brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums. Search primary sources from all over the country through DPLA.
OAIster
Identifies and often links to primary resources residing in digital repositories worldwide. See Auraria Library's Primary Reources guide and the eBooks Guide for more digital repository options.
Pacific Rim Digital Library Alliance
Twenty-eight academic libraries surrounding the Pacific have joined together to improve access to scholarly resources. Search here to find links to full-text resources from these libraries digital repositories. Contents include theses, images, historic documents, and more.
Europeana
Access millions of digital objects: film,photos, paintings, sound recordings, maps, manuscripts, books,newspapers and archival papers. Selected from already digitized resources available in Europe's museums, libraries, archives and audio-visual collections.
Public Domain Review
Founded in 2011, The Public Domain Review is an online journal, repository, and not-for-profit project dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas.
BASE: Bielefeld Academic Search Engine
Search engine created to pinpoint academic resources on the Web. About 60% are full-text.

Free eBooks for Children

Hockliffe Project
Early British children's books.
Children's Books Online: The Rosetta Project
Children's books beautifully digitized with translations into many languages available for each!
International Children's Digital Library
Books from many nations in many languages.

Free Non-English Language eBooks

DAR: Digital Assets Repository at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (The New Library of Alexandria)
A large collection of Arabic digital books, photo albums and more.
Gallica
Books, manuscripts and more from France's National Library (Bibliothèque Nationale de France.)
International Children's Digital Library
Books from many nations in many languages.
LitGloss
Litgloss is a collection of texts of literary or cultural interest, written in languages other than English, and expertly annotated so as to facilitate comprehension by English-speaking readers.
Online Books Page: Foreign Languages
Links to many sites featuring ebooks in non-English languages.

Free eBooks in Humanities and Social Sciences

Library of Congress: Digital Collections This link opens in a new window
These collections are a gold mine of online primary source materials collected by the world's largest library, The Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. United States History is especially well-represented, though the collection breadth is extensive. Contents include as Civil War photographs and music, U.S. slave narratives, women suffrage materials, historic advertising, early maps, music recordings and scores, English dialect recordings, gold rush narratives, cartoons, daguerreotypes, papers of distinguished individuals, Look Magazine photos, labor materials, posters, and much more.

Sites With Free Plays
A number of sites, listed on the Auraria Library Theatre Guide, leading to full-text plays online.

Making of America This link opens in a new window
Full-text books and journals on American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction, focusing on education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. Housed at two sites; Cornell and the University of Michigan.http://www.hti.umich.edu/m/moagrp/index.html

Complete Works of William Shakespeare
Digital Culture Books
An imprint of the University of Michigan Press dedicated to publishing innovative work in new media studies and digital humanities.
Early America's Digital Archive
A collection of electronic texts and links to texts originally written in or about the Americas from 1492 to approximately 1820.
Internet History Sourcebooks Project
A collection of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts presented cleanly (without advertising or excessive layout) for educational use.
Internet Sacred Texts Archives
Online books about religion, mythology, folklore and the esoteric. The site is dedicated to religious tolerance and scholarship.
Online Library of Liberty
Books on the topic of individual liberty and free markets.
Perseus Digital Library
Subject collections of full-text materials include Greek and Roman , Arabic, Germanic, 19th Century American, and Renaissance.
Poets' Corner
Thousands of poems from hundreds of poets.
Wright American Fiction
A collection of 2,887 works of fiction by lesser-known authors and allows insight into American literature, culture, and history during the period 1851-1875.
Theological Commons
A digital library of tens of thousands of books on theology and religion, as well as historic collections of audio, visual, and text-based content. Though the works reach back to the 10th century the bulk of the collection is from the 19th century.

Free eBooks in Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics

National Academies Press
Full text access to books (ebooks) in science, engineering, and health from the National Academy of Sciences.
Merck Manuals Online Reference Library
Merck Manuals available for free in digital form in multiple languages to professionals and patients around the world.
Biodiversity Heritage Library
The Biodiversity Heritage Library provides digitized copies of biodiversity literature and natural history works from rare book and museum collections from around the world. Collections include museum and herbarium libraries in Australia, China, Singapore, North America, Europe and England.
Bookshelf from the National Center for Biotechnology Information and the U.S. National Library of Medicine
Free online access to books and documents in life science and healthcare.
Turning the Pages: National Library of Medicine
Digitized images of rare and beautiful historic books in the biomedical sciences.
National Science Digital Library
Offers open access materials supporting science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education.

Books & eBooks: Free eBook Collections