Electronic Texts

Links to books, documents, journals and primary sources that are available in their entirety online. Be sure to explore our growing collection of e-books (available to TC3 students and staff only): ebrary Academic Complete has over 70,000 multidisciplinary academic titles from over 500 publishers; ACLS Humanities E-Book has over 3,000 full-text, cross-searchable e-books in the humanities; and Gale Virtual Reference Library has over 250 academic reference encyclopedias, almanacs, and specialized reference sources for multidisciplinary research; and the EBSCO eBook Collection (formerly NetLibrary) has full-text scholarly, reference and professional eBooks from leading university, academic and professional publishers.

Not sure where to start? Try the Online Books Page, a comprehensive index to over a million titles available on the Internet. The HathiTrust Digital Library has almost 10 million total volumes with over 25% of them in the public domain. The Library of Congress has an excellent resource: Finding E-books: A Guide created by J. Cheyenne Hohman, University of Kentucky. It covers Library of Congress E-books, External Web Sites, Devices and Formats and Access and Related Issues.

Below is a selection of resources that show the breadth and variety of free online books.

• African American Women Writers of the 19th Century - 52 published works by 19th-century black women writers. Includes poetry, short stories, histories, narratives, novels, autobiographies, social criticism, and theology, as well as economic and philosophical treatises. Part of the New York Public Library's Digital Schomburg.
• American Memory - Historical collections from the Library of Congress. With a Collection Finder organized by topic, format, time and place.
• Celebration of Women Writers - Comprehensive listing of links to biographical and bibliographical information about women writers, and complete published books written by women.
• Classics in the History of Psychology - Over 25 books and about 200 articles of "historically significant public domain documents from the scholarly literature of psychology and allied disciplines."
• Cornell Historic Monograph Collection - 441 General monographs, Cornell Dissertations and Math books.
• DSpace at SUNY - Digital repository of the State University of New York. The SUNY Press E Book Collection provides full-text access to over 600 books published by State University of New York Press titles published between 2000-2006. Some of the titles include Kindness and the good society by William S. Hamrick, Teaching cooperative learning: the challenge for teacher education by Elizabeth G. Cohen (winner of the 2004 AESA Critics' Choice Award), and Talking about a revolution: the languages of educational reform by Jacqueline Cossentino. (Note: The link to the full-text is at the bottom of the page.)
• Digital Library Federation Public Access Collections - Search or browse by collection or institution.
• Documenting the American South - Collection of over 1,205 books and manuscripts on Southern history, literature and culture from the colonial period through the first decades of the 20th century.
• Early Americas Digital Archive - "Collection of electronic texts originally written in or about the Americas from 1492 to approximately 1820."
• Early Canadiana Online - Over 3,000 books and pamphlets documenting Canadian history from the first European contact to the late 19th century. The collection is particularly strong in literature, women's history, native studies, travel and exploration, and the history of French Canada. (Ignore request for username and password)
• Electronic Literature Directory - "Descriptive guide to 2353 works, 1196 authors, and 193 publishers."
• Electronic Research Collections - Partnership between the United States Department of State and the Federal Depository Library at the Richard J. Daley Library, University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). There is an index.
• Electronic Text Center Modern English Collection - Fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, letters, newspapers, manuscripts and illustrations from 1500 to the present, arranged by author's last name or by category of interest. The Ebook Library consists of 2,100 publicly-available ebooks including classic British and American fiction, major authors, children's literature and American history. These titles are available in both HTML (web version) for online viewing and as a Microsoft Reader Ebook, suitable for downloading.
• EuroDocs: Online Sources for European History
• Google Book Search- Search for full-text public domain titles.
• Hathi Trust Digital Library - "Digital repository for the nation’s great research libraries."
• Internet Archive: Text Archive - Over three million items. Their Open Library is a project "to create free web access to important book collections from around the world."
• Internet Classics Archives - Over 400 works of classical literature.
• Internet History Sourcebook Project - Collections of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts (Ancient, Medieval and Modern).
• Making of America - Extensive digital library of nineteenth century books and journals. This digitization project was undertaken at both the University of Michigan and Cornell University with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Search both collections:

  The Michigan collection consists of imprints between 1850 and 1877 and "currently contains approximately 10,000 books and 50,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints." You can browse the Michigan collection by subject, author, and title.

  The Cornell collection, which covers the period of 1840 to 1900, "provides access to 267 monograph volumes and over 100,000 journal articles."

  You can also browse the periodical titles at Cornell and Michigan.

• National Academies Press - Over 4,000 online texts, searchable and indexed by subject.
• New York State Historical Literature - Cornell University Library collection of over 600 pamphlets and monographs.
• NYPL Digital Gallery - "Free and open access to over 700,000 images digitized from the The New York Public Library's vast collections, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints, photographs and more."
• OAIster Open Access Initiative (OAI) to create a "collection of freely available, previously difficult-to-access, academically-oriented digital resources that are easily searchable by anyone." OAIster currently [February 2006] contains 6,509,564 electronic records from 604 institutions. This project of the University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service allows you to search by author, title and subject and you can also search by resource type (text, image, audio, video, dataset). In addition, you can search or browse by institution. "For students or scholars in search of digital materials, particularly images, audio, and video, OAIster is a much better resource than standard Web search engines." (Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, February, 2006)
• Online Books Page - Comprehensive index to over 20,000 titles available on the Internet, listed by author, title, subject, and serials.
• Online Medieval and Classical Library - "Collection of some of the most important literary works of Classical and Medieval civilization."
• Oxford Text Archive - More than 2500 resources in over 25 different languages. Although many of the texts require the user to obtain written permission, there are a number of public domain texts available in a number of formats, with an emphasis on literary and linguistic disciplines.
• Perseus Digital Library - Digital library of textual and visual resources for the study of the ancient world.
• Presidential Libraries - National Archives. The Franklin D. Roosevelt Library has over 13,000 digitized documents.
• Project Gutenberg - Online library ofpre-1923 texts, available in text or compressed file (zip) format.
• Rand Publications - Includes reports in the fields of Child Policy and Civil and Criminal Justice.
• Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2011 - By Charles W. Bailey, Jr. "Articles, books, and a limited number of other textual sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet."
• UNICEF Publications - Browsable by subject, region, title and date.
• World Digital Library - "Makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world."
• Worldcat - Provides access to records for over 1 billion items in more than 10,000 libraries worldwide including the full-text of thousands of goverment publications. For example an advanced search for U.S. G.P.O.(keyword), human trafficking (title) and 2006 (publication date) will retrieve the full text of a Congressional hearing on Germany's World Cup brothels.
• Wright American Fiction - Collection of 19th century American fiction, as listed in Lyle Wright's bibliography American Fiction, 1851-1875. There are currently 2,887 volumes included by 1,456 authors.

Last update: Tuesday, November 29, 2011