O O Ø O O O O
The pd.o Guide to Free Electronic Books
The resources presented here are, to the best of our knowledge, available at no cost. If this turns out not to be the case, please contact us and we'll remove the link immediately.
Though they are free to read online, they may have further restrictions on use and redistribution. Please read their respective terms of use carefully.
As mentioned elsewhere, we respect and encourage the creation and dissemination of new intellectual property.
pintday.org-Hosted Content
A rich public domain is a wonderful thing. From time to time, we turn our markup efforts toward works of a more literary nature. I mean, these guys can’t touch the Pint Day Saints, but their prose is pretty good nonetheless.
- The pd.o Guide to a Liberal Education — not all in the public domain, but certainly all worth reading.
- The pd.o Guide to Words. Our collection of lovingly marked-up books, plays, and poems; XHTML 1.1-compliant, and fully in the public domain.
The Big Kahuna - Project Gutenberg
- What's to say? Visit. Read. Learn.
- Gutenberg at HWG - a (defunct?) project to mark up Project Gutenberg texts in XML or XHTML.
- Mazarin — A very cool (and open source) front end allowing search and display with pagination and HTMLification of gutenberg works.
- GutenMark — Looking for a start on marking up an etext? This handly little program does a pretty good job. I have an OpenBSD port in progress.
- Project Gutenberg of Australia — In Australia (and Canada, too), works enter into the public domain 50 years after an author's death, with very few exceptions. This means, among other things, the complete works of H.G. Wells, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and George Orwell are public domain in these countries.
- Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders project - One of the coolest Internet applications I've seen in a long time. Pop by and proofread a few pages in your spare time.
Other Projects
- The Oxford Text Archive — A collection of public domain and free-for-noncommercial use texts. A little confusingon the licensing front, but a nice resource nonetheless.
- The Newton Project. — This Project aims to create a printed edition of Newton's theological, alchemical and administrative writings and an electronic edition of all his writings, including his correspondence.
- Hanover's excellent guide to other etext archives.
- The Perseus Digital Library. An excellent collection of Classics (Greek and Roman), Papyri, certain Renaissance works, and others. Freely accessible, but unfortunately, they claim the copyright on their labours.
- University of Washington's English Server
- The University of Virginia etext Library. This project's stated goals are "to build and maintain an internet-accessible collection of SGML texts and images," and "to build and maintain user communities adept at the creation and use of these materials."
- The Online Books Page (at upenn) — A handy index to texts that are freely readable via the Internet
- The National Academy Press. A print-on-demand service that allows you to read the complete books online using a nifty web-based viewer. In their words: “NAP publishes over 200 books a year on a wide range of topics in science, engineering, and health, capturing the most authoritative views on important issues in science and health policy.”
- Cornell Digital Preservation Collection. A collection of public domain works on the history of the United States, New York State and “local” history, mathematics classics, and core agricultural history. A huge collection of scanned, TIFF pages.
- The MSU Digital and Multimedia Center. These kind folk have made public domain portions of their collection available online in a variety (JPG, GIF, PDF, HTML, SGML, and XML) of formats.
- University of Oaklahoma College of Law. Excellent collection of US Historical documents
- Arthur Wendover’s collection of HTML-marked up free books, most from Gutenberg.
- The Bralyn Archives. A site aimed at collecting works for nonprofit, educational purposes.
- Blackmask Online. HTML versions of many, many public domain works. Unfortunately, he has a “In theory, the HTML is copyrighted, but if you're looking to print out a dozen copies for a class or share a bunch with your friend, go ahead!” policy. I'm sure he means well, but why not put it back in the public domain?
- Free textbooks. Mainly, out of print and made freely available by their authors.
Copyright Hell
Determining whether a work is in the public domain can be quite a chore. Here are some useful links
- US Catalog of Renewals. Includes a nice catalog of author deaths — Morbid, but necessary since they changed the rules from date + X years to author death + X years.
- UPenn's Catalog of Copyright Entries. Scans of copyright renewals
Markup and Representation
- The Text Excoding Initiative develops standards (DTDs) for text markup for a variety of projects
Reference
- Bartleby.com — A comprehensive collection of reference material (and more). Though free to access, this material may not be reproduced.
- The Elements of Style — William Strunk, Jr.
- The DICT Development Group — Protocols and resources for online dictionaries. Includes an excellent summary of freely available dictionary files.
- The WordNet Project — A lexical database for the English Language, from Princeton University. In other words, a sort of meta-thesaurus. Though not precisely a book, the code and database is released under a BSD-style license, so it is free for use, modification, and redistribution. We have a local copy if you need.
Non-Fiction
- Freely available mathematical works.
- Tech Books for Free
- The Numerical Recipes Books
- A Huge list (in zip format) is available at Hogan Books
- Samizdat Press
- Linux Documentation Project
- Adobe Specifications Online — PDF, Postscript, Truetype
- Freely Available Programming References
- Unleashing the Idea Virus
- O'Reilly Open Books Project — Our favorite geek books, for free.
- The Hacker Crackdown — Bruce Sterling
Fiction
- Page by Page books. More free works
- Baen Free Library
- The Open Books Initiative — This looks to be a project similar to Gutenberg.