Need some new reading material? Public domain books and ebooks – books that are absolutely free to download and are no longer under copyright – are a great way to find fantastic books, from classics to romance to computer manuals. Here are 16 sources for free books or ebooks in the public domain you can quickly and easily download to your PC to read right in your Web browser. Most of these sites also make their content offerings available to download for a wide variety of e-readers (such as a Kindle or a Nook) as well.
Authorama
Authorama offers a wide variety of books from a great selection of authors, anyone from Hans Christian Anderson to Mary Shelley. If you’re looking for the classics this is a good place to start.
Librivox
Audio books are a great way to get your reading in especially if you’re in your car a lot, and Librivox looks to fill that need with hundreds of freely available audio books. Volunteers sign up to read chapters of public domain books, then those chapters are placed online for readers to download (for free!).Pro tip: be sure to look for the Librivox app to add to your mobile device so you can listen to all of your favorites on the go.
Google Books
From Google Books comes a nice selection of public domain ebooks mostly in the classical literature genre.
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg is one of the oldest sources for public domain books on the Web. Over 32,000 books available at the time of this writing, in many different formats (PC, Kindle, Sony reader, etc.). One of the widest selections you’ll find of freely available books on the Web.
Feedbooks
Feedbooks offers free public domain books, as well as original works from authors uploading their books to the site – great way to discover new reading from authors who aren’t necessarily in the spotlight as yet. In addition, if you’ve been itching to publish a book, Feedbooks is a good source to get the word out as well.
Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is an amazing resource for public domain books, with sub-collections such as American Libraries, Children’s Library, and the Biodiversity Heritage Library. More collections are added on a regular basis, so be sure to check back often for new reading material.
ManyBooks
ManyBooks offers more than 28,000 free public domain books for download. The site is organized so you can books as easily as possible: by Authors, by Titles, by Genres, by New Titles. This is one of the most user-friendly sites on the Web for finding and downloading free books.
LoudLit
Similar to Librivox, LoudLit partners up great literature found in the public domain with high quality audio recordings, both available for download right to your PC or e-reader.
Online Library of Liberty
The Online Library of Liberty offers readers “individual liberty, limited constitutional government, and the free market”, all in the public domain and free for download.
Questia
Questia offers books, journal articles, magazines, and newspaper articles, all in the humanities and social sciences. Questia is especially useful for anyone needing scholarly resources, since all the materials are reviewed by collection librarians.
ReadPrint
Books, essays, poems, stories…..all available at ReadPrint, along with 8000 other books by 3500 authors.
Classic Literature Library
This site is extremely well organized into collections: Classic American Literature, Classic Italian Literature, the complete works of William Shakespeare, Sherlock Holmes, Fairy Tales and Children’s Literature, and lots more.
Collection of Classical Thinkers
From the Institute of Learning Technologies, part of Columbia University, a collection of classic thinkers such as Dante, Plato’s The Republic, Virgil’s Aeneid, etc.
Christian Classics Ethereal Library
Read classic Christian writings from hundreds of years of church history.
O’Reilly Open Books Project
A number of technical books are available from the O’Reilly Open Books Project, mostly focusing on programming languages and computer operating systems.
How to Find Public Domain Books Using Google
There are a number of different searches you can plug in to Google to find public domain books. Use the following simply as suggestions. You can append whatever subject you’re looking for either in front or following the phrase in quotes, i.e., boating laws “public domain”. Quotes should be used around these phrases in order to bring back accurate results (see Looking for a Specific Phrase? Use Quotation Marks).
- “public domain”
- “this document is in the public domain”
- “this text is in the public domain”
- “this information is in the public domain”
- “this page is in the public domain”
- site:.edu “not copyrighted”
- site:.edu “public domain”
- site:.gov “not copyrighted”
- site:.gov “public domain”
- site:.org “not copyrighted”
- site:.org “public domain”
You can also use Google Scholar to find public domain works. Go to the Advanced Scholar Search, and in the Date/Return articles published between field, type in 1923 in the second date box. This will return public domain works (again, be sure to double check each piece of content to make sure that it does indeed fall under public domain).