E-book sources
These are just some of the sources I used for finding language e-books on the internet. If you were unable to find a specific e-book on this site, please check out some of the sites below.
- Probably has the biggest number of out-of-copyright e-books, scanned in from libraries. Unfortunately the scans are often not very good quality, and you may find that some e-books are not available in certain countries. If you cannot download an e-book from Google Books that is listed on this site, try searching in the Internet Archive.
- Thousands of e-books, and offers different options for downloading: PDF, flipbook, text etc. Lots of good stuff, and one of the friendliest layouts, just search a language name.
ERIC (Education Resources Information Centre)
- Specifically hosts educational books, mainly recent books donated from American publishers/educational centres. Some of the best e-books available include the DLI & Peace Corps language e-books. Make sure to use advanced search & tick 'full availability'.
- A lot of the books available here are illegal so be careful, but there are some non-copyrighted e-books if you look hard enough.
- Lots of grammars & dictionaries available for lesser-studied languages in South America, Papua New Guinea and elsewhere.
- Perhaps a hundred out-of-copyright language books here, I have already included most of them but there may still be some old readers and glossaries I have yet to add.
Textkit Digital Resources, Great Books on G'Oogle and Internet Pharrchive, Public-Domain Books for Classicists, Classics Index, Perseus Digital Library
- If you're learning Latin or Ancient Greek take a look at these extensive collections of educational and classic books.
CRE Language Learning - For Aid Workers
- Word documents (some with audio) that cover basic phrases and grammar to be able to communicate at a survival level. Lots of languages from Africa, Europe, Far East, Middle East and Near East.
- Out-of-copyright e-books for loads of languages, however, it also includes a lot of illegal stuff. Caution advised.
- Lots of grammar, vocabularies and dictionaries for Australian Aboriginal languages. Some e-books are available for direct download but for most you will need to fill in an access form to obtain them.
Govt. of Tamil Nadu - Textbooks Online
- Lots of readers for English, Urdu, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam for school children of different grades.
- Lots of language textbooks teaching through the target language; includes English, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Sanscrit, Tamil, Telegu & Urdu.
- Readers for school children, grades 1 to 12, for English, Hindi & Urdu.
- Lots of books available to view online, you can search in the subject 'languages', which makes things easier. However, viewing the books can be a bit of a pain, as they use the TIFF format.
- Out-of-copyright books viewable online. It uses the flipbook format, which unfortunately doesn't allow zoom-in.
- Full FSI courses for 39 languages, many with audio. These are the same courses used by the US government to train diplomats.
- Lots of grammars, descriptions, phonologies and orthographies for rarer languages, collected from the Rosetta Project.
Defence Language Institute (DLI) Courses
- Audio and pdf courses for many rare languages uploaded onto rapidshare and other similar file hosting sites. Many are military based in focus, and some of the audio is not great quality.
- Many DLI courses with audio, with several for each language available for direct download. Quality of the audio and pdfs varies.