BEST FREE DIGITAL LIBRARIES - WORLD

Project Gutenberg is the original free digital library of books no longer incopyright. So you'll find a great many classic literary texts here. The full Gutenberg collection now exceeds 5,000 books. The whole collection represents a monumental effort in unpaid, unselfish, labour since 1971.
The Project Gutenberg philosophy is to make information, books and other materials available to the general public in forms a vast majority of computers, programs and people can easily read, use, quote, and search.Their books are usually in plain text (ASCII) format. However to improve the online reading experience you can also use other reader software (check out our Software Page).http://www.gutenberg.net

Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts is a collection of public domain documents from American and English literature as well as Western philosophy. You can search for and display texts from the collection & also search their content, & even create on-the-fly PDFs for offline reading or printing.http://www.infomotions.com/alex

Athena Thousands of mainly French and Swiss-authored e-texts, across a broad range of especially Literature, Science & the Arts. In .html &. rtf versions. Also many links to famous works in German, Dutch & English too. Prepared or linked for the Web by the University of Geneva. Expand your mind & education here.http://un2sg4.unige.ch/athena/html/athome.html


Bartleby.com The Encyclopedia of World History and The Harvard Classics are among many free texts offered at this award-winning site. Many classic reference works are available here.http://www.bartleby.com/index.html

Bibliomania Offers more than 2,000 free classic texts, plus research works. In HTML format, readable by your web browser.http://www.bibliomania.com

CELT (Corpus of Electronic Texts). Irish literary, historical & cultural texts, in Irish, Latin, Anglo-Norman French, and English. Presented in HTML, with a searchable online database. An initiative of University College, Cork, Republic of Ireland.http://www.ucc.ie/celt

Complete Works of William Shakespeare but minus his poetry at present. The plays can be read either as a continuous text or by individual scenes. For reading online, in HTML.http://the-tech.mit.edu/Shakespeare/works.html

The Digital Library of the Commons (DLC) An archive of international literature on "the commons" (i.e. that which is held in common or by a community). Many useful features for both readers and contributing authors. A full-text Digital Library, a Working Paper Archive of author-submitted papers, and links to relevant references are included. Thanks to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the International Association for the Study of Common Property (IASCP) & the Indiana University Graduate School. As Adobe PDF files.http://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu

Ebooks Online Library Around a dozen authors ranging from Aesop to Sun Tzu, with huge representation of Charles Dickens & Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, plus a goodly measure of Jules Verne & Mark Twain. In very clear HTML for online reading, this collection has been sourced from Project Gutenberg and prepared with special attention to the needs for visually impaired and older readers. You can set the font size & colour, or background colour, with just a click in the Settings panel. http://www.readasily.com/


Electronic Text Collections in Western European Literature Links site for literary texts in Western European languages other than English. Languages include Catalan, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish & Swedish.http://www.lib.virginia.edu/wess/etexts.html

Electronic Texts On The Internet A useful links page with over eighty entries.http://www.refdesk.com/factelec.html

EuroDocs Primary historical documents from Western Europe. Selected Transcriptions, Facsimiles and Translations.http://library.byu.edu/~rdh/eurodocs

Great Books Index From Aeschylus to Virginia Woolf - links to online works, in English translation, by more than 130 classic authors. Please check for any copyright restrictions (which may in a few cases apply for other than reading online). A redoubtable effort from Ken Roberts of Ontario, Canada. http://books.mirror.org/gb.home.html

Great Books and Classics Provides free HTML online versions of many famous authors from before 200 BC to the 20th Century. Linked with Amazon.com for commercial print offerings of the titles.http://www.grtbooks.com

Internet Classics Archive More than 440 mainly Greco-Roman texts, with some Chinese and Persian. By 59 different authors. In English translation. For online reading, some downloads available.http://classics.mit.edu/