Open Access: OA eBooks

This is a collection of public domain and open access documents with a focus on American and English literature as well as Western philosophy. Its purpose is to help facilitate a person’s liberal arts education. “Big ideas don’t fit on a mobile.”

The American Verse Project is a collaborative project between the University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative (HTI) and the University of Michigan Press. The project assembled an electronic archive of volumes of American poetry prior to 1920. The full text of each volume of poetry was converted into digital form and coded in Standard Generalized Mark-up Language (SGML) using the TEI Guidelines, with various forms of access provided through the WWW.

An easier way to study hard.

Free Online Literature with more than 2000 Classic Texts.

Access 1000s of eBooks from NCBI.

Free, public domain eBooks provided without ads, requests for donations, or branding, since 02 October 2002.

Readable electronic books, including many of the classic works of literature.

Provides access to poems, prose, histories, diaries, journals, and letters written in or about the Americas from 1492 to approximately 1820. English and Spanish text from the Early Americas digital archive (EADS) database and the Gateway to early American authors on the web are also available.

Electronic literature is born-digital literary art that exploits, as its muse and medium, the transmedia possibilities of the digital. It is, according to the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO), “work with an important literary aspect that takes advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer.” [1]

Reading books in digital format is widely practiced. The world seems smaller and more connected when we can access literary texts instantly on the web. eBooks and digital publications can be expensive, though. As the library is to ink-and-paper books, these sites are to eBooks. Every site and page listed in this guide offers quality eBooks for absolutely no charge. Some can only be read directly on the site they are posted on, while many others are available to download on your reading device or computer. Enjoy browsing through the many, many selections that have been made available for public enjoyment.

The mission of HathiTrust is to contribute to the common good by collecting, organizing, preserving, communicating, and sharing the record of human knowledge.

The Internet Archive offers over 20,000,000 freely downloadable books and texts.

This is a growing collection of contemporary open access e-books. The books in this collection cover a wide range of subjects, including history, music, poetry, technology, and works of fiction. Most of the books in this collection were published in English, but there are some titles in other languages. All of the books in this collection were published under open access licenses and may be read online or downloaded as a PDF or as an EPUB.

Making of America (MoA) is a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. The collection currently contains approximately 10,000 books and 50,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints. For more details about the project, see About MoA. Making of America is made possible by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Access more than 50,000 free eBooks.

The National Academies Press (NAP) publishes the reports of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The NAP publishes more than 200 books a year on a wide range of topics in science, engineering, and medicine, providing authoritative, independently-researched information on important matters in science and health policy.

Listing over 3 million free books on the web.

Open access eBooks from Project Muse.

Open Library is an open, editable library catalog, building towards a web page for every book ever published.

A repository of full-text literary and linguistic resources.Thousands of texts in more than 25 languages.

Showcases collections and services developed as a part of the PDL's research efforts over the years.

Choose among free epub and Kindle eBooks, download them or read them online. You will find the world’s great literature here, with focus on older works for which U.S. copyright has expired. Thousands of volunteers digitized and diligently proofread the eBooks, for you to enjoy.

Digital access to the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Maniuscript Library.

Over 2,000,000 images from various collections of rare books, manuscripts, papyri, photographs and sheet music are available for your viewing. Each collection has its own web site that is unrestricted in the interests of knowledge and learning.

Open access publications form the University of California.

An ebook is an electronic version of a printed book. It is usually read on a hardware device (such as a Kindle or Nook). Personal computers and some cell phones can also be used to read ebooks. Some of the electronic book collections are searchable in the library's catalog.