Primary Sources Home: E-Books

Delivers public domain literature paired with high quality audio performances.

Sign up for the free version of Spotify to access audiobooks and speeches as well as music.

A directory of free online books and free ebooks. Browse the site using the subject categories or using the tags. There is also a Google Custom search engine. (site contains a lot of advertising)

Selected titles from the ACLS Humanities E-Book collection are provided with free access.

This is a collection of public domain and open access documents with a focus on American and English literature as well as Western philosophy.

" From free classics to great deals, there's a book for every budget on Kindle.

Kindle opens the door to hundreds of thousands of affordable books. Whether you're looking for a great romance, an epic tale of adventure, the latest financial advice or anything else, there are books for every reader and every budget. And with the free Kindle Reading app, you can enjoy all these affordable options even if you do not own a Kindle device.

To help you make the best use of your valuable reading time, below are top-rated free or cheap books in popular categories. Sometimes free books exhibit variable quality or do not support all the great Kindle reading features, so we recommend browsing the reviews and ratings from other readers. Or choose deals for limited-time savings on thoughtfully selected books. Happy reading (and happy saving)."

Provides free access to digital versions of selected titles from the Australian National University Press. Print copies may be purchased, if desired.

This site was created digitally preserve and disseminating "Tibetan and Sanskrit manuscripts that hold the philosophical, cultural, and religious heritage of endangered cultures dating back more than 2000 years." Selected texts are provided in English.

access the classic fiction, nonfiction, and reference books online and free of charge

Access free e-books, poems, short stories, etc. The site also provides study guides, teacher resources, message boards, and reference works. Free registration is required to access most resources.

"Looking for free ebooks? BookBub features limited-time offers for the best free books in over twenty genres, from both top-tier publishers and critically-acclaimed independent authors. These free ebooks are available on all devices, including Kindle, Nook, iPad, and Android."

Provides access to a collection of virtual books provided by the British Library.

"CABI (Centre for Agriculture and Biosciences International) is an international not-for-profit organization that improves people’s lives worldwide by providing information and applying scientific expertise to solve problems in agriculture and the environment. We are now able to support authors and collaborating organizations who wish to publish open access books across a wide range of subject areas within the applied life sciences and tourism."

Access to classic out of print titles published by the Cornell University Press.

"De Gruyter is the largest independent academic publisher of open access books, and more than 1000 open access books are available on degruyter.com" Also includes De Gruyter's open access journals.

"The directory is open to all publishers who publish academic, peer reviewed books in Open Access and should contain as many books as possible, provided that these publications are in Open Access and meet academic standards."

Classic works of literature available in DjVu format as well as in PDF.

"A collection of copyright-expired and generally out-of-print books from my library which I have scanned, proofed and submitted to Project Gutenberg for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. They may be copied or published with or without credit to either myself or Project Gutenberg under the terms and minimal restrictions outlined in the headers of each individual file."

"The Emory Women Writers Resource Project is a collection of edited and unedited texts by women writing from the seventeenth century through the early twentieth century. "

Access to public domain books on a variety of topics. Includes both fiction and non-fiction titles.

Free digital backlist titles from the Getty Publications Archives

Google's book digitization project provides access to a vast online collection of books, many are completely full-text. Others are limited to a preview or publication information only.
To limit the search to only items with the full view, use the the Free Google ebooks link on the left side of the screen after completing a search or use the advanced search and select Full View

The Google Play store provides access to free books; start with this page of the Top free ebooks that are available and search for more. After searching for a book or author or keyword use the price option to select free.

"Columbia University Press is pleased to announce that Gutenberg-e is now an open access site. These award winning monographs, coordinated with the American Historical Association, afford emerging scholars new possibilities for online publications, weaving traditional narrative with digitized primary sources, including maps, photographs, and oral histories. The American Council of Learned Societies also carry Gutenberg-e titles on their Humanities E-Book platform."

HathiTrust was 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 their digitized collections. Many of the collections are publicly accessible. Collections can be searched or browsed.

"The ICDL Foundation's goal is to build a collection of books that represents outstanding historical and contemporary books from throughout the world. Ultimately, the Foundation aspires to have every culture and language represented so that every child can know and appreciate the riches of children's literature from the world community."

This site contains a variety of collections including full text books, movies, and audio, software, and educational resources in addition to the WayBack Machine.

"The ebooks, which reflect JSTOR’s high standards for quality content, are freely available for anyone in the world to use. Each ebook carries one of six Creative Commons licenses determined by the publisher. The titles are easy to use, with no DRM restrictions and no limits on chapter PDF downloads or printing. Users will not need to register or log in to JSTOR."

The online books store Kobo provides access to a selection of free e-books as well as items for purchase.

"The digitized selections offered here represent a few of the most interesting and important items in the collection, including a copy of the Gutenberg Bible, Thomas Jefferson’s copy of The Federalist, medieval manuscripts, books relating to cookery, children's literature, and many more."

"Luminos is University of California Press’ new Open Access publishing program for monographs. With the same high standards for selection, peer review, production and marketing as our traditional program, Luminos is a transformative model, built as a partnership where costs and benefits are shared."

Free e-books available for download in a variety of formats.

"Five decades of Met publications on art history, available to read, download, and/or search for free."

Access O'Reilly Publishings Open Books--"books with various forms of "open" copyright".

"The OAPEN Library contains freely accessible academic books, mainly in the area of Humanities and Social Sciences. OAPEN works with publishers to build a quality controlled collection of Open Access books, and provides services for publishers, libraries and research funders in the areas of dissemination, quality assurance and digital preservation."

"The Online Books Page is a website that facilitates access to books that are freely readable over the Internet. It also aims to encourage the development of such online books, for the benefit and edification of all." The site was developed and is maintained by John Mark Ockerbloom of the Univeristy of Pennsylvania. The site provides an index to over 20,000 works in various formats available on the internet. It also includes a list of links to large, general, mostly English language digitzed collections.

"The Library is where electronic versions of classic books about individual liberty are stored. These texts go back some 4,000 years and cover the disciplines of economics, history, law, literature, philosophy, political theory, religion, war and peace." Items are provided free of charge for educational use.

A collection that provides access to hundreds of e-books for free. Others can be purchased from the site. Available topics are: Agriculture, Behavioral & Social Sciences, Biology & Life Sciences, Computers & Information Technology, Conflict & Security Issues, Earth Sciences, Education, Energy & Energy Conservation, Engineering & Technology, Environment & Environmental Studies, Food & Nutrition, Health & Medicine, Industry & Labor, Math, Chemistry & Physics, Science: Past & Future, Space & Aeronautics, Transportation & Infrastructure, and Policy for Science & Technology. Browse through these categories or use the search engine.

"At Open Book Publishers we are changing the nature of the traditional academic book. Our books are published in hardback, paperback and ebook editions, but we also publish free online editions of every title in PDF, HTML and XML formats that can be read via our website, downloaded, reused or embedded anywhere. We are proud to say that our books are currently being accessed freely worldwide by over 20,000 readers each month. "

Provides access to "The best free cultural & educational media on the web." It includes films & videos, ebooks & audiobooks, online courses, etc. It covers a wide variety of topics.

"As part of DPLA’s core mission of maximizing access to our shared culture, DPLA is aggregating openly-licensed books and making them available to libraries. Open Bookshelf is a digital library collection of popular books free to download, formatted for modern devices, and handpicked by a Curation Corps of librarians from across the US."

"In general, this Project is focused on the authors who wish to share their works with readers.

In particular, this Project is our Self-Publishing Press for eBooks presumed NOT to be in the public domain, but whose copyright holder is wiling to allow limited access to readers for personal study and non-commercial sharing."

"The Standard Ebooks project is 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. The text and cover art in our ebooks is already believed to be in the public domain, and Standard Ebook dedicates its own work to the public domain, thus releasing whole ebooks files themselves into the public domain."

"Established as the UK’s first fully open access university press in 2015, UCL Press has fast become one of the leading open access scholarly publishers in the UK, publishing both traditional peer-reviewed scholarly works and innovative research outputs. We currently publish 40 open access books a year in addition to 8 academic journals, and support UCL’s successful student journals programme."

"UC Press E-Books Collection, 1982-2004, is managed by the Publishing Group at the California Digital Library. As one of the University of California libraries, the CDL supports the assembly and creative use of the world's scholarship and knowledge for the UC libraries and the communities they serve. The Publishing Group program facilitates innovation and experimentation in the production and dissemination of scholarly works.

Almost 2,000 electronic editions of academic books have been published online at the UC Press E-Books Collection, 1982-2004, web site. All E-Books in the collection are available for free to UC faculty, staff, and students. Additionally, more than 25 percent of the books are available for free to the public."

"Unglue.it is a place for individuals and institutions to join together in support of free ebooks. We work together to support authors, publishers, or other rights holders who want their ebooks to be free. We work together to provide durable and effective distribution for ebooks that are free. We support Creative Commons licensing as an enabling tool to "unglue" the ebooks. We are part of the Free Ebook Foundation, a non-profit charitable organization." FAQ unglue.it

"The Universal Library Project, sometimes called the Million Books Project, was pioneered by Jaime Carbonell, Raj Reddy, Michael Shamos, Gloriana St Clair, and Robert Thibadeau of Carnegie Mellon University."

Offers open-access, scholarly books, including original monographs and edited collections; publishes, hosts, or provides access to the archives for eight refereed, open-access journals

"Lyle H. Wright, a librarian at the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA, created a bibliography of American fiction from the years 1851–1875, published as American Fiction 1851–1875: A Contribution Toward a Bibliography (San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library, 1957; revised 1965). He listed a total of 2,923 titles in adult fiction, including "novels, novelettes, romances, short stories, tall tales, tract-like tales, allegories, and fictitious biographies and travels, in prose" (from the introduction), and inventoried 18 American libraries for holdings. This compilation is part of his three-volume set listing American fiction from 1774 through 1900, and is considered the most comprehensive bibliography of American adult fiction of the 18th and 19th centuries."