FREE DIGITAL BOOK SOURCES

Sources supplied by Dr. John Jaeger, Doctoral Research and Reference Librarian, Dallas Baptist University:

Directories:

Gary Price of ResourceShelf provides a site that provides many other sources for free book content. see it:

The Online Books Page The University of Pennsylvania directory of online books.

Empire State College Library: Other Electronic Book Collections See "E-Book Collections" on the left side of the screen.

Google Directory>Reference>Libraries>Digital

Google Directory>Arts>Literature>Electronic Text Archives (some of which are free)

Project-Gutenberg's Partners and Associates is a directory of sources.

Infomotions' Gutenberg Index. This is a simple index to the Project Gutenberg collection of electronic texts. Use the links on this page to browse the author, title, and subject indexes. Use the search box to enter queries. . There are over 28,000 free books in the Project Gutenberg Online Book Catalog.
A grand total of over 100,000 titles are available at Project Gutenberg Partners, Affiliates and Resources http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Partners%2C_Affiliates_and_Resources.
Project Gutenberg Consortia Center http://66.175.80.131/PGCC/form/qualifiedSearch.jsp is an advanced search site. (CAUTION: Many firewalls block IP-based web addresses)

Free Books (an Australian site) www.e-book.com.au/freebooks.htm has 52 pages of Web sites listed but no search engine. (If you are even thinking about looking for free collections/databases of books, look at and copy this list. Their comments at the bottom of the list mention very shaky finances so copy it while it is still available.

OAIster (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) OAIster http://www.oaister.org/ is a project of the Digital Library Production Service of the University of Michigan University Library. Its goal is to create a collection of freely available, previously difficult-to-access, academically-oriented digital resources that are easily searchable by anyone. OAIster harvests from Open Archives Initiative (OAI)-compliant Digital Libraries, Institutional Repositories, and Online Journals. In early 2009, OAIster was taken over by OCLC.

Search Engines:

JustFreeBooks.info. It is now in Beta and says it covers 550 Web sites.

Ebook Search Engine.com

BookSpot.com

World Public Library is a commercial site. They say they cover over 500,000 books and will provide a means of accessing/searching them for $2.00 per FTE per year. (Individuals may also join - at $8.95/yr.)

Google Books

Internet Archive. The Open Content Alliance Web site mentions 1.2 million books held or accessible through the Internet Archive. They also mention 23 million accessible through Open Library (in beta).

Many Books.net http://manybooks.net/ This has free books for your PDA, iPhone or eBook reader. Presently it has over 23,000 titles.

Barnes and Nobles, the book retailer, has some ebooks available for free on their site. Just search by title or subject, and if there is a public domain edition available you can download it to read in their free ebook reader. They also have reduced cost (compared to the physical book) downloads of many titles.

The following search engines were found using the Google search strings: "free books" site:edu; and also: "free books" "search engines"

Digital Book Index has over 110,000 free books, etc.

Free EBook Library

100+ Sources for Free-As-In-Beer Books & Texts Online

Just Free Books covers over 700 web sites

Ebook Search Engine finds titles from smaller free book web sites

Free PDF Search Engine

PDF Search Engine search by words in title

PDF Search Engine search by topic or by title

Free Ebook Search Engine search by topic or by title

Collections / Libraries of Digital Books (some of which are free)

DMOZ: Top: Arts: Literature: Electronic Text Archive

LSU: Resources: Indexes and Databases: Electronic Text Archives

Electronic Text Archives Last updated 2006. Many other major collections can be located using Electronic Text Archive as a search string which may be combined with a subject.

Online Free Databases and Indexes:

Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts This is a collection of public domain and open access documents with a focus on American and English literature as well as Western philosophy. Its purpose is to help facilitate a person's liberal arts education. "Big ideas don't fit on a mobile." http://infomotions.com/alex/

Christian Classics Ethereal Library: Welcome to the CCEL! The mission of the CCEL is to build up the church by making classic Christian writings available and promoting their use. http://www.ccel.org/

Internet Sacred Text Archive Welcome to the largest freely available archive of online books about religion, mythology, folklore and the esoteric on the Internet. The site is dedicated to religious tolerance and scholarship, and has the largest readership of any similar site on the web. This covers many non-Christian religions.