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Electronic Books
Free sites that have material everyone can access
- Boston Public Library
The Boston Public Library offers a number of online collections. This includes popular books that can be downloaded onto e-book readers, as well as scholarly and rare book materials. These collections can be used by anyone with a BPL card. BPL cards are available to all Massachusetts residents, and can be obtained here: http://www.bpl.org/general/circulation/ecards.htm
- Google Books
Google Books is a proprietary digital library that contains over 10 million items. While many of these books can only be viewed by certain institutions, Google Books does offer free access to over a million items that are in the public domain. Those that cannot be viewed in their entirety can still be searched. All books are in PDF format, and public domain books can be downloaded.
- GPO Access
GPO Access is maintained by the Government Printing Office. It offers free access to several hundred thousand documents produced by the federal government. Many of these documents are available as PDFs, and all documents can be downloaded.
- Hathi Trust
Hathi Trust is a digital repository run by a number of the nation’s leading academic libraries. It contains over 7 million e-books, including over 1 million that can viewed by anyone. Over 18,000 of these free e-books are law books. These books can be viewed in your browser window, but cannot be downloaded. To view the free material, click on “Public collections”.
- Open Library
Open Library is run by the Internet Archive, is a nonprofit digital library. Open library provides free access to over 1 million e-books through openlibrary.org. These texts can be viewed in your browser, or downloaded.
- Project Gutenberg
Founded in 1971, Project Gutenberg is the oldest digital library in the world. It provides access to over 33,000 e-books, free of charge. These texts are available in a range of formats, including .txt files, Word docs, and PDFs. All of the material can be downloaded, and viewed on a number of devices.