You can freely download books from Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, Kafka, Tolstoy, Jane Austin, Oscar Wilde, Victor Hugo and thousands more from Project Gutenberg. In addition you can also download a wide variety of non-fiction including seminal books on History, Mathematics, Architecture, Sex, Business as well as most of the Greek and Roman classics.
Project Gutenberg is the world’s first and largest single collection of free electronic books. It was founded in 1971 by Michael Hart, who given a large amount of free computing time, decided to use the computing power to store the text of books that were out of copyright. Effectively Michael’s Etext is the forerunner of computing ebooks. It was decided that the books were to be stored in Plain Vanilla ASCII, (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), a format which meant that the books could be read on virtually any computer in existence.
The project has gone from strength to strength and now stores over 28,000 books itself and over 100,000 free books in related projects. The philosphy of Gutenberg is simply:
- should cost so little that no one will really care how much they cost
- should so easily used that no one should ever have to care about how to use, read, quote and search them
The aim is to eventually convert a high proportion of out of copyright books to be stored for free access.
The front page on all the Gutenberg books states: “This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org.”
Users therefore have the right to read the books, modify the text, to convert the books to other formats and they can also republish and sell the books. In fact many of the publishers selling series of books, both in print and in ebook form, of literature, business and classics originate from Gutenberg. List of available books.
Most of the work in the project is done by volunteers from proof reading, identifying books out of copyright, burning CDs and DVDs and fund raising. Distributed Proof Readers checking one page at a time are particularly useful.
