You can read thousands of books for free without breaking any law. The most reliable places to start are Project Gutenberg for classic literature, Standard Ebooks for beautifully formatted classics, LibriVox for free audiobooks, OpenStax for university textbooks and the Online Books Page as a giant index of everything else. Your local public library, through apps such as Libby, adds recent bestsellers on loan at no cost.
This guide grew from a long list of free reading sites first compiled by Bachelors Degree Online and shared widely in 2014. The web has changed a great deal since then, so the collections below focus on projects run by universities, libraries and long-standing non-profits, organised by what you want to read.
How free books can be legal
A book is legal to share for free in three main situations:
- It is in the public domain. Copyright has expired, so anyone may copy it. In the United States, works published in 1930 or earlier are now public domain, and another year's worth joins them every 1 January.
- It has an open licence. Many modern textbooks are published under Creative Commons licences that allow free copying with credit.
- The author or publisher has given permission. Some writers offer free editions to find new readers.
Copyright terms differ between countries, which is why the same book can be free in one place and protected in another. Project Gutenberg, for example, follows US law; a German court blocked the site in Germany from 2018 until a 2021 settlement, and it has been blocked in Italy since 2020. If you are outside the US, check your own country's rules before downloading.
A practical warning: sites offering brand-new bestsellers for free are almost always pirated, and they are a common source of malware and intrusive ads. The legitimate collections below will not ask for card details to download public domain books.
Classic literature and general libraries
- Project Gutenberg: started in 1971 by Michael S. Hart with the US Declaration of Independence, it now holds close to 78,000 free ebooks, from Austen and Dickens to Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, Twain and Conrad. Books come in EPUB, Kindle and plain-text formats.
- Standard Ebooks: a volunteer project founded by Alex Cabal in 2015 that takes public domain texts, proofreads them and gives them careful modern typography. The catalogue is smaller, about 1,500 titles, but the reading experience is excellent.
- The Online Books Page: hosted by the University of Pennsylvania, it indexes free books across the web. It also runs useful special lists, including banned books and prize-winning books.
- Open Library and the Internet Archive: millions of scanned books, with public domain titles free to download. Lending of in-copyright books was restricted after publishers won the case Hachette v. Internet Archive in 2023, upheld on appeal in 2024.
- Planet eBook and ManyBooks: friendly front ends for classic novels, from Dostoevsky to D. H. Lawrence.
- Bartleby and The Literature Network: long-running sites with anthologies, short stories, poems and reference works.
Free textbooks, science and technical books
Students can save a lot of money here, although it is always worth checking which edition your course requires.
- OpenStax: a non-profit at Rice University, founded in 2012, that publishes peer-reviewed textbooks for popular college courses in science, maths, social sciences and business. Most are under a CC BY licence.
- MIT OpenCourseWare: lecture notes, problem sets, videos and some full texts from real MIT courses, including mechanical engineering, mathematics and chemistry.
- Light and Matter: open-source physics textbooks written by Benjamin Crowell.
- Wikibooks: collaboratively written manuals and textbooks, from cookery to programming.
- Free Tech Books: a directory of free computer science and programming books.
For medical topics, the free clinical reference once called eMedicine now lives on as Medscape Reference; it is written for professionals, and anyone with health questions should talk to a doctor.
Audiobooks and children's books
- LibriVox: launched in 2005 by Montreal writer Hugh McGuire, it has volunteers record public domain books. Its catalogue passed roughly 20,000 audiobooks by late 2024, including plenty of historical fiction, and every recording is itself public domain.
- International Children's Digital Library: a free collection of children's books from many countries and languages, searchable by age, length and whether a story is true or make-believe.
- Gutenberg and Standard Ebooks also carry children's classics such as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Secret Garden and Aesop's Fables.
Books in other languages
- Perseus Digital Library (Tufts University): ancient Greek and Latin texts in the original and in translation, with dictionaries linked word by word.
- Project Runeberg: Nordic and Scandinavian literature.
- Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes: a vast Spanish-language library, searchable by author.
- Liber Liber: Italian books and audiobooks, browsable by author, title or subject.
- Projekt Gutenberg-DE: German-language texts arranged by genre and author.
- CELT: University College Cork's Corpus of Electronic Texts, with key documents of Irish history and literature.
- KEIMENA: a Greek-language page of modern Greek literature online.
Poetry, plays and specialist collections
- The Complete Works of William Shakespeare: MIT's simple, ad-free edition of every comedy, tragedy and history.
- A Celebration of Women Writers: a University of Pennsylvania project collecting works by women authors through history.
- Poem Hunter: a large, ad-supported archive of poems by Dickinson, Poe, Whitman, Blake and many others.
- Baen Free Library: started in 1999 by science fiction author Eric Flint and publisher Jim Baen to test whether free ebooks help sales. According to Baen, they did, both for the free titles and for the authors' other books.
- Classic plays: Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, Shaw's Pygmalion, Synge's The Playboy of the Western World and Ben Jonson's plays can all be found on Project Gutenberg.
What happened to the rest of the original list
The 2014 list contained about a hundred sites, and the web has not stood still. Some closures can be confirmed: the online library Questia shut down in December 2020, Flat World Knowledge moved its textbooks to a paid model, and the picture-book site Lookybook is long gone. Many small, hand-built sites have gone quiet too, and some old domains now belong to unrelated owners, so we have not linked to them here.
For the record, the original collection also named Classic Bookshelf, Page by Page Books, Classic Book Library, Classic Reader, Read Print, The Spectator Project, Bibliomania, Online Library of Literature, Fiction.us, Free Classic Literature, Textbook Revolution, KnowThis, FullBooks, TechBooksForFree, FreeScience.info, byGosh, Munseys, Ideology.us, ReadBookOnline.net, Public Bookshelf, Foxglove, Get Free Ebooks, SF and Fantasy Books Online, Project Laurens Jz Coster, ATHENA, Proyecto Cervantes, Corpus Scriptorum Latinorum, Italian Women Writers, Biblioteca Valenciana, Ketab Farsi, the Afghanistan Digital Library, Access Genealogy, Chest of Books, Free-eBooks.net, 2020ok, MysteryNet, TopMystery, Famous Poetry Online, World eBook Library, DailyLit and Authorama. If you go looking for any of them, treat downloads with care and stick to sites that clearly explain the copyright status of what they offer.
Tips for reading free books
- Choose EPUB for most e-readers and phone apps; Kindle devices also accept EPUB files sent through Amazon's Send to Kindle service.
- Check the translation date on foreign classics. Public domain translations are often old and stiff, and a modern library loan may read better.
- Join your public library. Apps like Libby lend current ebooks and audiobooks for free, legally and with no ads.
Sources: Original list compiled by Bachelors Degree Online (shared via Endo Riot); background from Wikipedia: Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks, LibriVox, OpenStax, Open Library, Baen Free Library and Questia.
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