Literature
Major Digital Libraries
Special Collections
BookShare
Bookshare is an online library made for individuals with disabilites that can impact their abilitiy to read, such as dyslexia and blindness. Bookshare offers many options for the user such as large font and audiobook format. Bookshare is not free however for schools, and students the fee is waived. Bookshare has close to 1 million titles and is supported by the U.S. Department of Education. Bookshare is only avaliable to individuals with disabilities as providing access to individuals without disablities would create legal issues for the site.
LibriVox
LibriVox is a group of worldwide volunteers who read and record public domain texts creating free public domain audiobooks for download from their website and other digital library hosting sites on the internet.
Lit2Go
Lit2Go has a well-curated selection of free literary audiobooks. Each audiobook contains a PDF copy of the work and includes a grade scale that represents the readability of the text.
Open Culture
This source, created by Dan Colman, Dean of Stanford University, is an educational website that includes over 1,000 free audiobooks as well as free ebooks, movies, podcasts and other educational materials.
Rare Book Room
This digital library has a collection of rare books that have been digitized and can be read and viewed. You can search the database by institution and find a variety of books including first editions of important manuscripts from the Library of Congress.
General Collections
Bibliomania
This site is one of the best loved literature portals on the internet. It was voted one of the top 300 websites in the World by Forbes magazine. It has thousands of e-books, poems, articles, short stories and plays, all of which are absolutely free.
The British Library
The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and the largest library in the world by number of items cataloged. Over 200 million items from many countries in over 30 subject areas.
Center for the Book
The Center for the Book provided by the U.S. Library of Congress (LOC) provides users with free, immediate access to dozens of classic ebooks, booklists geared towards different age groups and for different genres, author webcasts, local resources, and more. The site also links visitors to an eReference page with frequently asked questions as well as a live chat service and to the LOC's collections, which contain more than 160 million items - books, photographs, manuscripts, recordings, electronic resources, and more - in both digital and physical form.
Fiction.us
Fiction.us is a great place to find free online novels. Just as the website name says, this site contains lots of fiction books including many award-winning books. The books are split into chapters, so it's easy to remember where you left off. The site also offers poetry, plays and picture books.
The Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is a non-profit, 501(c)(3), who’s mission is to “provide Universal Access to All Knowledge”. All works provided are on the website are free for users to access. The Archive enables users to access and download the digital materials freely or by “checking out” the object with their available software. Currently, the Archive provides access to the following: 475 billion web pages; 28 million books and texts; 14 million audio recordings (including 220,000 live concerts); 6 million videos (including 2 million Television News programs); 3.5 million images; and 580,000 software programs. Texts available for free download can either be viewed online or downloaded in the users preferred format, e.g., pdf, kindle, epub, full text, etc. Likewise, the majority of works provided by the Internet Archive are in the public domain and could potentially be added to a library’s OPAC. However, extensive coordination with the Internet Archive would need to occur for this content migration to take place.
Contributed by Rhian PetermanInternet Archive: Digital Library of Free & Borrowable Books, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine. (n.d.). Retrieved April 14, 2021, from https://archive.org/
Library of Congress
This collection is a holding of a few hundred subcollections accessible from the Library of Congress. The collections consist of materials in a variety of formats and across over 60 subjects.
The Literature Network
The Literature Network offers access to searchable online literature for students, teachers, and those passionate about the subject. The site currently has over 3500 books and over 4400 short stories and poems by more than 260 authors. Additionally, the site offers forums for users to engage and share with over 71,000 other members. Works are free and available to view online only, and are not available for download. As such, integration into a library’s OPAC would not be feasible at this time and a link to the Literature Network website may be listed under the library’s additional resources if desired.
http://www.online-literature.com/
Contributed by Rhian PetermanThe Literature Network: Online classic literature, poems, and quotes. Essays & Summaries. (n.d.). Retrieved April 14, 2021, from http://www.online-literature.com/
Luminarium
Luminarium is a comprehensive anthology and guide to English literature of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Seventeenth Century, Restoration and Eighteenth Century. It’s a collective encyclopedic project that first started in 2001 to provide historical contexts for the people, places, and events featured on the site with the intent of being a site of the Who's Who and What's What in Medieval and Renaissance England. Some of the main categories include: Medieval, Renaissance, Seventeenth Century, Eighteenth Century (Restoration), Religious Writers, Ren Drama, Metaphysical Poets, Cavalier Poets, and the Encyclopedia Project. The site contains files, text, encyclopedia entries, and links suggestions for further reading. Items are either able to be read in-browser, are linked to outside sources that are free (like Google Books), or sometimes linked to further resources that are not free. Though the site was last updated in 2012, the historical information is vast and reliable.
Contributed by Stephanie ArmatisLuminarium: Anthology of English Literature (n.d.). Retrieved April, 14, 2021, from http://www.luminarium.org/
Manybooks
With more than 29,000 free eBooks, you're bound to find one that interests you. Patrons have the option to browse by most popular titles, recent reviews, authors, titles, genres, languages, and more.
OpenLibrary
This on-line project is part of Internet Archive, a non-profit organization. OpenLibrary is an accessible, open source database that has an editable library catalog. Includes an entry for every book added by users, with a goal of having an entry for every book ever published.
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg identifies itself as “an online library of free eBooks.” The mission of the project is “to encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks.” The collection consists of over 30,000 items covering a variety of topics and interests, with works being either fiction or nonfiction in nature.
World Literature
Biblioteca Virtual De México
Biblioteca Virtual De Mexico is a virtual library that has Mexican paintings, literature and newspapers. This library also includes virtual exhibitions of literature authors.
Canadiana
Canadiana is a free digital library that focuses on Canadian literature, history and political documents. In this library, you will find a variety of different works from Canadian authors as well as have the opportunity to learn more about Canadian History. Includes texts in Ojibwa, Ukrainian and Mi’kmaq.
Corpus of Electronic Text
This free multilingual digital library is a collection of Irish literature and history including old, middle and classical Irish literature. This also includes some Spanish and French original literary works.
Gallica - The National Library of France
The National Library of France has a digital library: Gallica. This collection has a vast amount of French literature. This includes children literature, manuscripts and sound recordings amongst many other topics.
Perseus Digital Library
The Perseus Digital Library is a free collection that focuses on Greco-Roman literature as well as the American Civil War and early modern english. This library also includes “The Cambridge History of American Literature” anthology which has a variety of great historical works, the “Shakespeare Glossary”, Arabic literature, and Italian poetry.
The Universal Digital Collection: Million Book Collection
Content that ranges from scientific, literature, and artistic works are compiled and digitally preserved in the database that is maintained by Carnegie Melon University. The resource that is available 24/7 to users, allows for the online search database to be used at anyone's convenience and will be a model for other databases that will be created.
The Universal Digital Collection: Million Book Collection. (2008). http://ulib.isri.cmu.edu
Contributed by: Kara ChenUniversity of Sydney, Digital Library Collections
This digital library includes a variety of free Australian collections including Henry Lawson manuscripts, Faculty Projects, Australian women writers, and Australian Journals.
https://digital.library.sydney.edu.au
World Digital Library
The World Digital Library provides free access to manuscripts, rare books, maps, photographs, and other important cultural documents from all countries and cultures, in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.
Children
Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature
Has the largest collection of Early American Juvenile Imprints of any academic institution in the United States. The Baldwin Library is known for comparative editions of books, with special emphasis on Robinson Crusoe, Pilgrim’s Progress, Aesop’s Fables, and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Contributed by: Mariella FajardoInternational Children's Digital Library
This site offers free children's books from around the world in PDF form. The ICDL is an organization that promotes empathy and compassion through literature.
http://www.childrenslibrary.org
Contributed by: Karen McNairLibrary of Congress - Kids (READ)
This section of the Library of Congress website contains a collection of children books, storytimes and interviews with authors. The purpose of this website is to provide a variety of literacy resources for children.
Oxford Owl
Created by the Oxford University Press, this website offers a free selection of picture ebooks. All that is needed to create is a free account. Ebooks can be sorted by letters and sounds to help with your children's reading.
Storyberries
Storyberries is a children's book library that includes ebooks as well as audiobooks. This selection includes chapter books, poems, comic books and stories written by children. Each book contains time and grade level allowing parents and teachers to know if this book fits the time and grade level of thier kids/students.
Storyline Online
This is a storytime website in which celebrities host storytime. Children can select a book and watch the storytime video. This website is free of charge and is endorsed by the American Library Association.