Your local public library isn’t the only place to find free literature. There are a number of different websites that provide free books, short stories, poems, and other literature. Here are 25 places you can find free literature and literature summaries online:
Free Literature
- Project Gutenberg offers more than 30,000 free books in its online books catalog. An additional 100,000 books can be found through the site’s partners and affiliates.
- The Online Books Page lists more than 35,000 books that are freely available online. Users can search by author, title, subject, and serial name.
- The Literature Network provides searchable online literature, literature forums, a quotation database, and an impressive author list.
- Public Literature offers a user-friendly interface for people who want to read books, poetry, and audio in the public domain. The site also features a modern literature blog.
- Great Literature Online archives British and American literature in the public domain.
- Literature Project is dedicated to providing electronic versions of classic books, poems, and plays.
- Perseus Digital Library hosts a growing and constantly evolving collection of ancient texts.
- Classic Reader has thousands of classic literary works available for download. Offerings include fiction, nonfiction, short stories, poetry, and books for young readers.
- Classic Bookshelf offers free literature and special software that makes reading electronic books more enjoyable.
- Classic Book Library is a good place to find historical literature, children’s literature, and romance. The free online library also offers mystery and other genres.
- Bibliomania combines classic literature with book notes, author biographies, and study guides. More than 2,000 works are available.
- Page by Page provides hundreds of classic books that can be read online in the site’s e-library.
- Gilead.org has republished the entire works of Hans Christian Andersen in English with original illustrations.
- DailyLit sends free books to your email address. Each book is broken down into small, easy to manage increments that take less than five minutes to read.
- PodioBooks delivers serialized audio books as podcasts. Users subscribe to the books they are interested in and establish a delivery schedule.
- Librivox provides free literature from the public domain. Books can be read online or downloaded as an mp3 file.
- Lit2Go is an online service that offers classic stories and poems that can be downloaded online or through iTunes.
- Literal Systems was founded by a group of local actors and technicians who work to create free audio books that can be downloaded as an mp3 files.
- The Spoken Alexandria Project is in the process of creating a free audio book library with downloads in multiple formats. New books are added on a regular basis.
- Classic Audio Books features a modest collection of free audio books. Some books are human narrated; others were created using advanced text to speech.
Free Literature Summaries
- CliffNotes free literature guides include chapter summaries, character analysis, essays, study help, and information about authors.
- SparkNotes offers detailed chapter summaries and analysis for hundreds of books.
- Book Wolf provides a modest collection of literature summaries and interpretations that have been sorted by title and author.
- LitSum is a good place to find full chapter summaries and topics for discussion. Other free materials include character analysis, quotes, and theme guides.
- Pink Monkey is a “G-rated study resource” with nearly 500 downloadable and printable literature summaries and study guides.
Guest post from Karen Schweitzer who writes about college resources for OnlineColleges.net.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks Karen (and Jamie) for all these wonderful resources. We love Gutenberg and particularly Librivox! Can’t wait to explore all the others!!
http://www.freeliterature.org
Exists since april 15, 2010.
Two goals: supporting Project Gutenberg (by producing e-text) and free e-literature on the web in general … and more (by linking to more than 450 sites that matter, all over the world in many different languages).
Check out a book you like to work on for a first or second round proofreading. Beginners are fully supported, people wanting to do more will be guided through the whole process - from scanning to pleasantly readable e-book.
(Links will be more ordered thematically and by language in the near future…)
As this might be of interest to people visiting your site, would you consider placing a link there?
Best Regards,
Marc D’Hooghe