Many thousands of e-books with expired copyrights are available for free on the web. The difficult part is finding where these collections are located. Below is a short list of the more robust collections. One of these sites may have just the book you were looking for but couldn’t find for less than $50.
- Project Gutenberg – Probably the best known of all free e-book sites, Michael Hart began this project in 1971, making it the granddaddy of all e-book sites. Currently 36,000 books can be downloaded in a number of formats.
- Internet Archive:Digital Library — A huge library of digital texts, audio, moving images and software, as well as archived web pages. I’ve found several course texts here. Many hard-to-find texts can be found here.
- LibriVox — Audio books. If you learn more by listening to a book than by reading it, try this out. Many thousands of books from Project Gutenberg have been recorded in a number of file formats
- Bartleby — Features “Great Books”.
- Internet Archive — A vast warehouse of web-based books, movies, photos, various e-flotsam and e-jetsam. Look for the “Texts” menu tab near the top of the page. A fascinating sample of what this archive has to offer: an 11 minute video trolley ride down Market Street just four days before the great 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Like opening a window on early-2oth century San Francisco. I have used this site for a free copy of Aquinas’ Summa Theologica.
- Open Library — Over 1,000,000 e-books available. These are digitized copies of physical books so the experience is very much like reading an actual book.
- Online Books – Over 15,000 books, usually .txt files. Operated by the University of Pennsylvania.
- Internet Public Library — Links to over 20,000 titles. A joint venture of Drexel University and Florida State, you can search e-text collections all over the web with their search tool.
- Google Books — Thousands of public-domain books are available.
- Internet Classics Archive — 441 books by 59 different authors. Maintained by MIT. A good source for Aristotle and Plato, among many other Greco-Roman authors. Powerful search capabilities and links to other collections of ebooks.
- Christian Classics Ethereal Library — Often recommended by HACS instructors. An excellent collection of Christian texts. The formatting facilitates online reading and, if you create a free account, you can bookmark or highlight texts in books and even add comments. Highly recommended
- New Advent – A reliable source of the Summa Theologica. Often recommended by HACS instructors. This site also hosts the Catholic Encyclopedia, a library of Catholic documents and a collection of documents from Church Fathers.
- IntraText — a vast compendium of e-texts.
- Dominican House of Studies — a good source for St. Thomas’ texts.
