Sources for free books

Questia claims to be the largest on-line library. Project Gutenberg has 19,000 titles.

Out of print and out of copyright titles avaiable in electronic form.


Questia claims to be the world’s largest on-line library. Be that as it may, I found some valuable but hard to get but valuable titles on it. See for yourself and decide for yourself.
http://www.questia.com/
Project Gutenberg offers 19,000 out of copyright books from classics, Nineteenth Century translations, to government reports. I downloaded the entire oeuvre of Honoré de Balzac as summer project a few years ago and I am slowly making my way through his Comedie Humane.
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

12 thoughts on “Sources for free books”

  1. I hadn’t been to project Gutenberg in a long time. I got annoyed with it when I realised all their text files had line breaks hard typed.
    This meant that if you were viewing the txt document on a small screen (pda) the computer would wrap the text AND THEN there’d be the line break halfway through the now readjusted line.
    Gutenberg texts were trapped in one format. They couldn’t be printed. They couldn’t be read on the go.
    It’s excellent to see that they’ve done away with this in the html files.
    Nice, also, to see the integration with wikipedia, limited as it may be.

  3. Hi Michael,
    Thanks for the blog. I’m sure we will gain many useful insights from it.
    Here are some more sources of texts online.
    The Online Library of Liberty at http://oll.libertyfund.org/ has many useful works of political theory. The Christian Classics Ethereal Library at http://www.ccel.org/ has a quite significant collection of religious works online. The Marxists Internet Archive at http://www.marxists.org/reference/index.htm also has an extensive and diverse array of primary materials available online. The Internet Public Library at http://www.ipl.org/ has quite a few useful links to collections. The Oxford Reference Online at http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/GLOBAL.html is also useful. Last but not least is the uni’s own SETIS at http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/index.html .
    My one caveat re these sources is that they sometimes include superseded translations.
    I hope that this helps.
    Best wishes,
    Dwane

  6. Dear Michael,
    Thanks for the links, the blog is a great idea and definitely a very useful network.

  7. Michael,
    Here are a few more collections of e-texts. Adelaide U at http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/ has an extensive collection of e-texts plus many links to other e-text projects. Other collections include the Bibliothèque Nationale de France’s Gallica project at http://gallica.bnf.fr/ including its collection of utopian literature at http://gallica.bnf.fr/Utopie/ and the Bibliotheca Augustana at http://www.fh-augsburg.de/~harsch/augustana.html which has a broad variety of material.
    regards,
    Dwane

  9. Hi Michael,
    Some more free sources from the depths of the web. The International Political Theory website http://www.international-political-theory.net/ has quite a few links to e-texts related to international political theory, as well as its own free e-journal, the ITP Beacon, some currently free articles and a variety of unpublished papers. Some useful though dated links can be found on this site which lists journals devoted to political theory, http://lgxserver.uniba.it/lei/filpol/filpole/fplege.htm . On a related theme, the Citizendium, http://www.citizendium.org/ will undoubtedly compete with the Wikipedia as a source of free knowledge.

  10. Hi Michael,
    Here are some more sources of free e-texts. Richard Kimber’s website at http://www.psr.keele.ac.uk/thought.htm has many links to websites that contain free classical political theory e-texts. A few more can be found at the Web Books website at http://www.web-books.com/Classics/Nonfiction/Philosophy/ The Online Books Page at http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/ has a variety of material available. The University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service project at http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/c/collsize/collsize has many links to free e-text collections and Valerio di Stefano’s website at http://www.classicistranieri.com/newlist.htm has many free e-books, mainly literature in original languages, available for download (warning: turn pop-up blocker on for this site).
    Regards,
    Dwane

  11. Hi Michael,
    While not a source of free digital books as such, the Library Thing website at http://www.librarything.com/ might be of interest to your readers who use/struggle with Endnote, or as another research tool.
    regards,
    Dwane

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