Electronic Books

Looking for some reading material? Or perhaps some older books that we don't have on the shelf for your paper? There are a lot of books legally available online for free. Here's a small list.

Project Gutenberg. A database full of books available in the public domain. From Greek plays to 19th century novels; if it's not in copyright, take a look here. Titles are regularly added. You might also want to take a look at DailyLit which will send books in small portions to your email or RSS feed, and LibriVox for public domain audio books.

The Questia Online Library is another public domain library with over 5,000 books freely available.

The Internet Public Library also hosts a directory of free texts available online to read.

Bartleby's has a large collection of books freely available online: reference works, fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.

The CIA World Fact Book. This is no longer a print publication and is now only available online. You can download all or a portion of the book for free, and you will need a pdf reader like Foxit or Adobe to view.

O'Reilly Open Books. O'Reilly is best known for publishing computer-related books. Less well-known is their policy of using non-traditional copyright laws. Several of their titles, both in print and out of print, are available online, often through a Creative Commons License.

While it is not an e-book collection, check out Creative Commons for an ever-increasing list of books available online with “some rights reserved” as opposed to “all rights reserved.” Also check the library's delicious.com account under the “creativecommons” tag for books released online in this format. Several CC license books can be found for free online, usually through the author's web site.