Free Classic Literature in the Public Domain from the Classic Literature Library

Main Sections of the Classic Literature Library

William Shakespeare - The Complete Literary Works of William Shakespeare, 42 plays, poems and The Sonnets from the bard himself. You will also find 11 Plays attributed in part to William Shakespeare and 19 of Shakespeare's plays/books translated to German.

Jules Verne - The Complete Literary Works of Jules Verne. This French Author is best known for such classics as Around the World in 80 Days and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The Jules Verne site includes most of Verne's books in both the original French and English translations and we even found a few Dutch translations!

King James Bible - The Old and New Testament of the King James Bible, from Genesis to The Revelation of Saint John the Devine what more can we say about this classic religous book.

Charles Dickens - The Complete Literary Works of Charles Dickens including the children's classic Oliver Twist.

Wilkie Collins - The Complete Literary Works of Wilkie Collins, a close friend to Charles Dickens, this classic literature author is the creator of one of the finest English detective novels the Moonstone.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - Featuring the legendary detective Sherlock Holmes. Also listed under the Detective Stories part of our site.

Charles Darwin - The Complete Works of Charles Darwin's classic scientific literature, including this British Authors most famous and controversial work in the field of Evolution: The Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection.

Mark Twain - The Complete Literary Works of Mark Twain. This classic American Author AKA Samuel Langhorne Clemens is best known for the sequel to Tom Sawyer: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). The Classic Literature Library received the DMOZ Cool Site Award for this part of our literature website.

Robert Louis Stevenson - The Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson. This Scottish Author is best know for Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Bram Stoker - If you are a fan of classic Dracula or vampires you must of heard of this Irish Author.

Fairy Tales and Children's Literature - The works of L. Frank Baum, including The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and the entire Oz series (over 20 books). You will also find the works of Lewis Carroll, including the classic children's book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

Free Recipes - Currently 75,000 recipes and over a dozen public domain classic cook books including Simple Italian Cookery.

Italian Books - I'm learning Italian and what better way to learn than from Classic Italian Books. Ok there is a better way, travel through Italy and immerse yourself in the culture and language, if only I had the time.

Romance Books - Includes the complete Memoirs of Jacques Casanova (30 volumes!!) and all Jane Austen romance novels.

Classic Literature Library

from Wikipedia

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is a US project aimed at providing public access to digital holdings in order to create a large-scale public digital library. It officially launched on April 18, 2013, after 2.5 years of development. The DPLA is a discovery tool, or union catalog, for public domain and openly licensed content held by the nation's archives, libraries, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions.

It was started by Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society in 2010, with financial support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and has subsequently received funding from several foundations and government agencies, including the US National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

It "aims to unify such disparate sources as the Library of Congress, the Internet Archive, various academic collections, and presumably any other collection that would be meaningful to include. ... They have yet to ... decide such issues as how near to the present their catalog will come.

There is an ongoing dispute regarding so-called 'orphan works' and other questions of copyright." John Palfrey, co-director of the Berkman Center, stated in 2011: "We aspire to establish a system whereby all Americans can gain access to information and knowledge in digital formats in a manner that is 'free to all.' It is by no means a plan to replace libraries, but rather to create a common resource for libraries and patrons of all types.

The DPLA links service hubs, including twelve major state and regional digital libraries or library collaborations, as well as sixteen content hubs that maintain a one-to-one relationship with DPLA.

Digital Public Library of America

from Wikipedia

Europeana.eu is an internet portal that acts as an interface to millions of books, paintings, films, museum objects and archival records that have been digitised throughout Europe. Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci, Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer, the works of Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton and the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart are some of the highlights on Europeana.

More than 2,000 institutions across Europe have contributed to Europeana. These range from major international names like the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the British Library and the Louvre to regional archives and local museums from every member of the European Union.

Together, their assembled collections let users explore Europe's cultural and scientific heritage from prehistory to the modern day.
Europeana

About Google Books

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Try a search on Google Books or on Google.com.
When we find a book with content that contains a match for your search terms, we'll link to it in your search results.
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If the book is out of copyright, or the publisher has given us permission, you'll be able to see a preview of the book, and in some cases the entire text.
If it's in the public domain, you're free to download a PDF copy.

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We've created reference pages for every book so you can quickly find all kinds of relevant information: book reviews, web references, maps and more.

Internet Archive Search

from Wikipedia

The Internet Archive is a San Francisco-based nonprofit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including web sites, software applications/games, music, movies/videos, moving images, and nearly three million public-domain books.

As of May 2014, its collection topped 15 petabytes. In addition to its archiving function, the Archive is an activist organization, advocating for a free and open Internet.

The Internet Archive allows the public to upload and download digital material to its data cluster, but the bulk of its data is collected automatically by its web crawlers, which work to preserve as much of the public web as possible. Its web archive, The Wayback Machine, contains over 150 billion web captures. The Archive also oversees one of the world's largest book digitization projects.

Founded by Brewster Kahle in 1996, the Archive is a 501(c) nonprofit operating in the United States. It has an annual budget of $10 million, derived from a variety of sources: revenue from its Web crawling services, various partnerships, grants, donations, and the Kahle-Austin Foundation. Its headquarters are in San Francisco, California, where about 30 of its 200 employees.

Most of its staff work in its book-scanning centers. The Archive has data centers in three Californian cities, San Francisco, Redwood City, and Richmond. Its collection is mirrored for stability and endurance at both the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt and at another facility in Amsterdam.

The Archive is a member of the International Internet Preservation Consortium and was officially designated as a library by the State of California in 2007.

What is Open Culture’s Mission?

Open Culture brings together high-quality cultural & educational media for the worldwide lifelong learning community. Web 2.0 has given us great amounts of intelligent audio and video. It’s all free. It’s all enriching. But it’s also scattered across the web, and not easy to find. Our whole mission is to centralize this content, curate it, and give you access to this high quality content whenever and wherever you want it.

Some of our major resource collections include:

950 Free Online Courses from Top Universities
675 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.
550 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free
600 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices
MOOCs from Great Universities (Many With Certificates)
Learn 46 Languages Online for Free: Spanish, Chinese, English & More
200 Free Kids Educational Resources: Video Lessons, Apps, Books, Websites & More

Open Culture was founded in 2006. You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus.

Who is Behind Open Culture?

Dan Colman, the lead editor, is the Director & Associate Dean of Stanford’s Continuing Studies Program. Before that, he served as the Managing Director of AllLearn, an e-learning consortium owned by Stanford, Oxford and Yale, and as the Director of Business Development and Editorial Manager at About.com.

He received his PhD and MA from Stanford, and his BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The common thread running through his career is his interest in bringing relevant, perspective-changing information to large audiences, often with the help of the internet. You can reach Dan at mail@openculture.com.

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes for Open Culture regularly.

Josh Jones received his PhD in English at Fordham University and is a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.

Mike Springer, a journalist living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, writes daily for Open Culture.

Ayun Halliday is a writer and actor. She is best known as the author and illustrator of the long-running zine The East illage Inky.

Eric Oberle provides very generous technical support for the site. Without him, you would be getting 404s instead of regular doses of intelligent media.

Matthias Rascher teaches English and History at a High School in northern Bavaria, Germany. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twitter.

Kate Rix writes about k-12 instruction and higher education on a regular basis.

Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman, or read more of his writing at the Huffington Post.

Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.

Is the Site Affiliated with Stanford University?

This site is not associated with Stanford. The ideas/views expressed here belong to Dan, or others. But, in all cases, they are private ones.

How Can I Contact Open Culture? Feel free to drop us a line at mail@openculture.com.

Can I Advertise on Open Culture?

Yes. You can immediately place ads on Open Culture by using Google’s Adwords platform. This will give you the ability to target the whole site or specific pages.
Open Culture

Project Gutenberg offers over 50,000 free ebooks: choose among free epub books, free kindle books, download them or read them online.

We carry high quality ebooks: All our ebooks were previously published by bona fide publishers. We digitized and diligently proofread them with the help of thousands of volunteers.

No fee or registration is required, but if you find Project Gutenberg useful, we kindly ask you to donate a small amount so we can buy and digitize more books. Other ways to help include digitizing more books, recording audio books, or reporting errors.

Over 100,000 free ebooks are available through our Partners, Affiliates and Resources.
Project Gutenburg

from Wikipedia

Wikimedia Commons (or simply Commons) is an online repository of free-use images, sound, and other media files. It is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Files from Wikimedia Commons can be used across all Wikimedia projects in all languages, including Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikivoyage, Wikispecies, Wikisource, and Wikinews, or downloaded for offsite use.

The repository contains over 30 million media files. In July 2013, the number of edits on Commons reached 100,000,000.

Wikimedia Commons