Books Online

The Internet has a large number of texts available free for download. Because of copyright restrictions, most of these texts are older--old enough, at any rate, for their copyrights to have expired, or never to have been under copyright at all. What this means in practice is that there is not a lot of twentieth century literature available, but there is a wealth of classic and not-so-classic texts from the nineteenth century and before.

The number of online texts available is growing literally every day, so if you can't find the book you are looking for, just wait a little while--it will probably appear. Or you can speed up the process by putting in a request at a clearinghouse like the University of Pennsylvania's Online Books Page.

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General Collections and Clearinghouses

• Google Books:  The main page for Google's online library. It includes many free texts, as well as extensive sample pages from at least some of the copyrighted material. (google.com)
• The Online Books Page: Although it is now being challenged by Google Books, this was the best single source for free online books of all kinds for many years. A clearinghouse rather than a separate collection; it includes books drawn from a wide variety of other online collections. (U. of Penn.)
• Voice of the Shuttle: An excellent and wide-ranging source for books in the humanities. A clearinghouse rather than a separate collection; includes books drawn from a wide variety of other online collections. See especially its English Literature Page. (U.C./Santa Barbara)
• Literary Resources on the Net: Not a books page, but a selective (and very good) guide to other books pages on the Internet. (Jack Lynch)
• Project Gutenberg: One of the original online books projects. Includes "classics" (like Homer and Shakespeare), as well as more popular texts (like Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs) and a miscellany of other texts (on sometimes rather odd subjects).
• Project Bartleby: A good but limited collection of "classic" books (named after Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener"); "classic" is stretched a bit to include writers like Agatha Christie. (Columbia Univ.)

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Specialized Collections

• Luminarium: Covers English literature from the middle ages, Renaissance, seventeenth century and Restoration. A rich and elegantly designed site.
• Internet Classics Archive: The Internet's best collection of classical Greek and Roman texts in English translation. Also includes a small handful of translations of Chinese and Persian works. (M.I.T.)
• Online Medieval and Classical Library: A growing collection of works from the middle ages and from classical antiquity. Also includes some Renaissance works. (U.C./Berkeley)
• Representative Poetry On-line: An anthology of verse in English. Necessarily selective, but a rich and interesting collection. (Univ. of Toronto)
• Litrix Reading Room: A collection primarily of popular fiction, including older science fiction, mysteries, westerns, etc.
• Online Library of Literature: Another collection which includes more popular works. Small, but worth a visit if you are looking for Tarzan or Sherlock Holmes or the Wizard of Oz.