Project Gutenberg
gutenberg.org
Seventy thousand out-of-copyright books as clean EPUB, Kindle and plain text
No sign-upClassic
Loading page
openlibrary.org
A catalogue page for every book ever published, many of them borrowable.
The Internet Archive's attempt at one editable record per book, wired to its lending library so a good share of twentieth-century titles can be borrowed as scans for an hour or fourteen days. It is the best free way to check an edition, an ISBN or a table of contents, and occasionally to read the book itself. Lending is one-copy-one-borrower, so popular titles have waiting lists.
Questions
Free to use, but you have to register before it will do the job. Borrowing needs a free Internet Archive account, and litigation has cut what is lendable — many records now show a catalogue entry and no copy.
Yes. Open Library sends your input to its own servers to process it. That is fine for public material; for anything containing personal data, use one of the on-device tools instead.
Borrowing needs a free Internet Archive account, and litigation has cut what is lendable — many records now show a catalogue entry and no copy.
Alternatives
Same category or same task, ordered by how closely they overlap.
gutenberg.org
Seventy thousand out-of-copyright books as clean EPUB, Kindle and plain text
archive.ph
Freezes one page on demand into a snapshot that keeps working when it moves
arxiv.org
Free preprints in physics, maths, computer science and quantitative biology
feedly.com
Collects the sites you follow into one reverse-chronological list you control
scholar.google.com
Searches academic papers and shows who has cited each one since
instapaper.com
Saves an article for later and strips it down to just the text