Digital Texts and Books

The following resources hold texts and digitized images of documents with very few other resources such as photographs, audio, etc.

Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts: “The Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts is a collection of about 14,000 “classic” public domain documents from American and English literature as well as Western philosophy.”

American Verse Project: This project is a collaborative project between the University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative (HTI) and the University of Michigan Press. The project is assembling an electronic archive of volumes of American poetry prior to 1920. The full text of each volume of poetry is being converted into digital form.

Bartleby: Brought to readers from Columbia University, this site reproduces classic literature in hypertext and maintains a strong emphasis on the quality and integrity of the text.

BiblioVault: University of Chicago Press, with financial support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, developed this resource that serves more than 50 university presses and contains digital files for more than 12,500 books.

Bookboon - Thousands of open-source e-books written by professors and other experts for students, business professionals, and more.

Book TV - 48 hours each weekend of TV about non-fiction books. Live streaming is free but programs can be purchased too. Podcasts, and youtube channel also available. Companion site to Book TV on C-Span2.

Carrie: Lynn H. Nelson, creator of CARRIE, is an Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Kansas. The site is now part of the WWW-VL History Central Catalogue at the European University Institute, Florence, Italy. It contains archival materials from WWI, the López Martín Collection, and other documents.

CELT: The Corpus of Electronic Texts brings the wealth of Irish literary and historical culture to the Internet, for the use and benefit of everyone worldwide. It has a searchable online textbase consisting of 935 contemporary and historical documents from many areas, including literature and the other arts.

Digital Library of the Commons: DLC is a gateway to the international literature on the commons. This site contains an author-submission portal; an archive of full-text articles, papers, and dissertations; the Comprehensive Bibliography of the Commons; a Keyword Thesaurus, and links to relevant reference sources on the study of the commons. You’ll also find a new online photo collection from this link.

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) - DOAJ is an online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.

DRUM: The Digital Repository at the University of Maryland provides links to various faculty-contributed research and publications, UM theses and dissertations from December 2003 forward, and collections of technical reports. The site is slightly confusing, but when you search for a document, you need to scroll down the page to gain access to the file. These files are all open access.

Electronic Text Center: This digital collection, sponsored by the University of Virginia, is an on-line archive of standards-based texts and images in the humanities, The collection is offered in fifteen different languages.

ePage@Tech: This is Georgia Tech’s resource page for electronic texts, including theses and dissertations. Most of this collection is open access.

Google Book Search: This database continues to grow, with more than a hundred thousand titles added by publishers and authors and some 10,000 works in the public domain now indexed and included in search results. Google Book Search allows public-domain works and other out-of-copyright material to be downloaded in PDF format.

HathiTrust - A partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world.

Humanities Text Initiative: The Humanities Text Initiative, a unit of the University of Michigan’s Digital Library Production Service, has provided online access to full text resources since 1994. You’ll gain open access to text collections including the Making of America site, which holds over 12,639 volumes containing 3,792,847 pages of e-text. This is a collaborative effort with Cornell University.

Hypertexts: The University of Virginia comes through again with electronic texts that focus on American studies. The Yellow Pages on this site lists the online texts by topics that range from ethnicity to science and technology.

International Children's Digital Library (ICDL) - Free access to high-quality digital books from around the world. Browse by age, genre, book length, character types, or even the color of a book's cover. The ICDL Foundation's goal is to build a collection of books that represents outstanding historical and contemporary books from throughout the world.  Ultimately, the Foundation aspires to have every culture and language represented so that every child can know and appreciate the riches of children's literature from the world community.

Internet Library of Early Journals: This is a joint project offered the Universities of Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester and Oxford (UK) that aims to digitize substantial runs of 18th and 19th century British journals. They make these images available on the Internet, along with associated bibliographic data.

Internet Sacred Text Archive: John B. Hare has an academic background in linguistics, anthropology and computer science, and he worked in the high technology field as a computer programmer and entrepreneur for twenty five years prior to starting this site, which is a freely available archive of electronic texts about religion, mythology, legends and folklore, and occult and esoteric topics.

National Academies Press: Viewers can gain access to more than 3,700 books online free, and purchase from more than 1,900 PDFs listed on the site. When you click on a book, you may need to scroll down the page to find the full free text listed on the left.

Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations: NDLTD is an international organization dedicated to promoting the adoption, creation, use, dissemination and preservation of electronic analogues to the traditional paper-based theses and dissertations.

Online Books Page: the University of Pennsylvania lists over 25,000 free books on the Web. Some books are hosted at the site, other listings point to other Web sites that carry full text transcriptions or page images.

OpenStax - An open-source online library of free, peer-reviewed textbooks for academic courses.

Oxford Text Archive: The Oxford Text Archive is generally considered to be the oldest digital archive of academic primary source materials. OTA holds several thousand electronic texts and linguistic corpora, in a variety of languages. Its holdings include electronic editions of works by individual authors, standard reference works such as the Bible and mono-/bilingual dictionaries, and a range of language corpora.

Penn Libraries: Scroll down to “Locally developed digital collections,” and you’ll discover open access projects such as SCETI (Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image, the Furness Collection Images (Shakespeare and English Renaissance), and more. Some projects are Penn access only.

Perseus: The Department of Classics at Tufts University, Boston, offers this digital library project that includes collections of humanities resources. If you experience difficulties with the site you can try to access the mirror sites in Berlin or in Chicago.

Project Gutenberg: Michael Hart founded this collection in 1971, and it’s now known as the oldest digital library. Most of the over 22,000 items in this collection consist of full texts of books in the public domain. Many independent organizations that share Project Gutenberg’s ideals have been given permission to use the Project Gutenberg trademark.

Royal National Institute for the Blind: The RNIB digital collection contains a talking book service, where users can gain access to 14,000 mostly unabridged titles in popular fiction, classic titles and non-fiction for people of all ages. The books can be ‘read’ on special DAISY (Digital Accessible Information System) players.

Scribd - Extensive online library of books.

Textbook Revolution - A student-run site dedicated to increasing the use of free educational materials by teachers and professors. We want to get these materials into classrooms. On this site you'll find links and reviews of textbooks and select educational resources. Some of the books are PDF files, others are viewable online as e-books, or some are simply web sites containing course or multimedia content.

The Internet Classics Archive: Select from a list of 441 works of classical literature by 59 different authors, including user-driven commentary and “reader’s choice” Web sites. You’ll discover mainly Greco-Roman works (some Chinese and Persian), all in English translation. The site is housed at MIT (Massachesetts Institute of Technology).

Tribal Writers Digital Library: The Sequoyah Research Center, located in Little Rock, Arkansas, supports the activities of the American Native Press Archives (ANPA). The ANPA digital text project brings out-of-print literary efforts of American Indians, Alaska Natives, and First Nations people of Canada to readers world wide. Viewers can copy these resources freely for personal use, research, and teaching (including distribution to classes) as long as a statement of reference is included.

UMDL Texts: UMDL Texts is the central access point for electronic books and journals provided by the University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service. Browse through collections that focus on historical and current texts on dentistry, poetry, and more.

University of Georgia Digital Books: Download the DjVu plugin to view digitally enhanced works (deWorks), in addition to searchable book facsimiles, broadsides, posters, photographs, maps, manuscripts, transcripts, newspapers, and periodicals.

Wright American Fiction Project: This site is part of the LETRS project at Indiana University. The books, which were written from 1851 – 1875, include full texts online that are searchable by author, title, and phrases.