In This Guide:

E-book Collections: Free

Free: Collections & Finding tools

Free collections | Finding tools

Free collections:

Bibliomania
Full-text classics from fiction, religious studies, dictionaries, poetry, drama and more.
Christian Classics Ethereal Library
Full-text English or English translations of Christian writings from a variety of time periods. Searchable by keywords, authors and titles.
Classic Bookshelf
Gutenberg-e
Open-access, award winning scholarly history books, combining "traditional narrative with digitized primary sources, including maps, photographs, and oral histories".

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A program from the American Historical Association and Columbia University Press.
Library of Congress - digitized texts
More than 60,000 books digitized by the Library of Congress. Searchable by author or title.
NCBI Bookshelf
A collection of biomedical books that can be searched directly or from linked data in other NCBI databases. The collection includes biomedical textbooks, other scientific titles, genetic resources such as GeneReviews, and NCBI help manuals.
OAPEN Library (Open Access Publishing in European Networks)
Freely accessible academic, peer-reviewed books, mainly in the humanities and social sciences.
Use the Browse Menu to filter by subject or language.

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OAPEN Foundation was established by the University of Amsterdam (UvA), the University of Leiden (UL), the University library of Utrecht University (UU), the Netherlands Academy of Sciences (KNAW), the National Library of the Netherlands (KB) and Amsterdam University Press (AUP).
Open Knowledge Repository (OKR) from the World Bank
The World Bank’s official open access repository for its research outputs and knowledge products. Launched in 2012.
Open Library
The World's classic literature ... more than 1 million free ebooks. Includes a collection of ~250,000 current ebooks. Creating an account is required to 'check out' materials.

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A project of the non-profit Internet Archive.
Posner Memorial Collection
Collection of six hundred twenty-two titles includes landmark titles of the history of western science, the decorative arts and fine sets of literature. From Carnegie Mellon University.
Project Gutenberg
The oldest and largest free database of e-books.

Finding tools:

Digital Book Index
An index with links (a finding tool) to online books. Most are freely available, but some are fee-based.
Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)
DOAB provides a searchable index to peer-reviewed monographs and edited collections published under an open access licence, with links to the full texts of the publications at the publisher’s website or repository.
Just Free Books
Searches the content of more than 700 web sites, including gutenberg.org, wikibooks.org and archive.org.
OAIster
A union catalog of 30 million records for digital resources from open-archive collections worldwide.
Online Books Page University of Pennsylvania
Listing over 2 million free books on the Web