Project Gutenberg is a library of over 60,000 free e-books on a variety of topics. It only accepts donations of e-books which are not currently protected by copyright in the United States. New Project Gutenberg e-books are typically digitised versions of books that were published a long time ago and for which any US copyright has expired.
Founded in 2008, HathiTrust is a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries preserving 17+ million digitized items. HathiTrust offers reading access to the fullest extent allowable by U.S. copyright law, computational access to the entire corpus for scholarly research, and other emerging services based on the combined collection. HathiTrust members steward the collection — the largest set of digitized books managed by academic and research libraries — under the aims of scholarly, not corporate, interests.
The primary aim of DOAB is to increase discoverability of Open Access books. Search, browse and download from a large selection of eBooks.
The collection includes over 2,000 eBooks from academic presses on a range of topics, including art, science, history, music, religion, and fiction. More than 500 of these are available for free download. Content is free for non-commercial use.
More than 2,400 books across engineering, physical sciences, life sciences, health sciences, and social sciences published under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.
OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) is a collaborative initiative to develop and implement a sustainable Open Access publication model for academic books in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Nearly 1,000 free online titles available.
The Marxists Internet Archive is an all-volunteer, non-profit public library, established in its present form in 1998. It contains the writings of around 850 authors representing a complete spectrum of political, philosophical, and scientific thought, generally spanning the past 200 years. MIA contains these writings in 80 different languages, comprising a total size of over 180,000 documents and 288 GB of data, all created through the work of volunteers around the world. A vital resource for any humanities or social sciences student!
There are plenty more place where you can access digitised texts for free, both historic and brand-new publications. Remember also that some classic texts are available for purchase as e-books very cheaply from online bookstores. Although such e-books are currently only available for purchase by individuals and not by libraries, they are usually very accessible (similar to EPUB) and even feature text-to-speech capability. You could consider purchasing these e-books yourself if you are unable to access texts in any alternative formats.
University of Exeter LibGuide is licensed under CC BY 4.0
