Digital Libraries & Online Electronic Texts
There are many resources on the Internet offering free access to classic works of literature, politics, philosophy, sociology etc. Here are just some of those resources, divided into general search sites, and subject specific sites:
General Search Sites
E-server.org - 42 collections on such diverse topics as contemporary art, race, Internet studies, sexuality, drama, design, multimedia, accessible publishing and current political and social issues. In addition to written works there are hypertext, audio and even video recordings.
Freebooks - An Australian site that offers access to the world's best digital libraries, free book sites and sacred and religious texts.
Humanities Text Initiative - A unit of the University of Michigan's Digital Library Production Service, providing access to collections of full-text resources.
Internet Public Library Online texts section - The IPL Online Texts Collection offers over 19,000 titles that can be browsed by author, by title, or by Dewey Decimal Classification.
ManyBooks.net - Offers access to 11,577 eBooks for free.
Online Books page - A listing of 25,000+ online books and texts.
Online Library of Liberty - classic works on art, economics, history, law, literature, music, philosophy, political theory, religion, science, sociology, war and peace
Oxford Text Archive - Several thousand electronic texts in a variety of languages.
Perseus Digital Library - An evolving digital library aiming to bring a wide range of source materials to as large an audience as possible.
Project Gutenberg - The Internet's oldest producer of free electronic books. Started in 1971, Project Gutenberg now offers over 17,000 online books.
Rare Book Room - Read and examine some of the great books of the world, including works by Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Leibniz, Mill, Paine etc.
Wikisource - An online collection of free content source texts built by its contributors. Covers fiction and poetry, philosophy and religion, historical documents, court rulings, speeches, some reference material, some claified documents and national anthems.
Internet Book Search Sites Offering Some Full-Text
Amazon A9 - Select Books from the menu, and search over 100,000 works. Clicking on the title will take you to the shop where you can get a look at current works, and a further option to search inside (not retrieve) the entire text of the book.. For the future Amazon Pages will allow you to purchase only those pages of interest.
Google Book Search - Google keeps on digitising books, despite the furore over copyright. You have a further option to search for a keyword inside the book and retrieve individual pages.
Microsoft Live Search Books - Searches a database of public-domain titles scanned from the holdings of participating libraries.
Subject Specific Sites
Classics
Online Classical and Medieval Library - A collection of some of the most important literary works of Classical and Medieval civilization.
History
Making of America - 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 8,500 books and 50,000 journal articles in the form of scanned images of the pages in the books and journals.
In Parantheses - Texts, translations, and commentaries from a wide variety of areas and disciplines including Arthurian, Old English, Medieval, Greek, Latin, Chinese, Japanese, Orientalism, Old Norse, Peruvian, Syriac, Sanskrit and Restoration drama.
Online Classical and Medieval Library - A collection of some of the most important literary works of Classical and Medieval civilization
The ORB - The Online Reference Book for Medieval Studies: Textbook lists page.
TEAMS Middle English Texts - The goal of the TEAMS Middle English text series is to make available to teachers and students texts which occupy an important place in the literary and cultural canon but which have not been readily available in student editions.
Literature
Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts - A collection of public domain documents from American and English literature as well as Western philosophy.
Bartelby.com - Literature: four sections deal with reference, verse, fiction and non-fiction.
Bibliomania - Over 2,000 classic works of literature completely free of charge: literature, poetry, drama, biographies and reference works.
Literature.org: The Online Literature Library - The full and unabridged texts of classic works of English literature.
Sonnet Central - An archive of English sonnets, commentary, and relevant web links
Philosophy & Political Philosophy
Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts - A collection of public domain documents from Western philosophy.
Online Library of Liberty - classic works on art, economics, history, law, literature, music, philosophy, political theory, religion, science, sociology, war and peace
Sociology
A Sociology Timeline - A chronological review of sociologists, philosophers and political theorists, with links to many of their texts.
