Free books

1 Internet archive public library

One of the many wonderful features of the Internet Public Library is not its browsing page, which is a mess. I laboriously found the old-enough-to-be-hopefully-uncopyrighted books by clicking dozens of checkboxes. Start from that to avoid disappointment when it turns out that the IPL lending program has been taken down by Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House, in a controversial move.

2 Wellcome library

Great content, but not always a great online-first experience.

Thousands of items from our collections have been digitised, and copies are freely accessible online. Our digital collections cover a wide variety of topics, and are particularly strong in the areas of mental health, sex and sexual health, genetics, public health, and 19th-century books.

If you’re a member of the library, you also have access to many of our subscription databases and resources with your library card.

Digitised materials from our collections can be accessed and downloaded for use under a variety of Creative Commons non-commercial, attribution and Public Domain licences, depending on the material.

You can find all our digital items in the catalogue. An option to limit your search to online material appears once you have entered a search term. You can also search for digital images in the “Images” tab on the catalogue

The trick is to limit searches to “online” records, like so: search dissection.

3 Erara

erara the incredible library of ultra-high-resolution lovingly digitised manuscripts and prints.

4 viaLibri

viaLibri is a search engine for actual physical books. It sometimes includes lavish high-resolution previews. Try, e.g., Rare books from 1621.

5 Textbooks

• LibreTexts
• Directory of Open Access Books
• OER Commons
• OpenStax
• Open Textbook Library
• American Inst. of Mathematics, Approved Textbooks

6 References