There are some good sites on the web which offer free books to read online. These are ones which don't rely on a subscription based service for readers to browse through full text book selections, or require individual membership through an academic institution to gain access to high quality literature.
Read Print
A good website which features a small yet focused collection of works written by classic authors from the likes of William Shakespeare to Jane Austen, is the Read Print Library at readprint.com. This site, whilst offering a shorter collection of books, poems and short stories compared to large scale literature websites gives readers a concise and clearly presented selection of books to choose from.
Site Summary
The Read Print website helpfully uses brief overviews for author biographies with clear chapter headings for each section of every book or poem. Read Print also provides famous quotes from the text, in addition to a full summary of collected works for each author.
A useful feature of the site is that it uses a 'reading mode' setting which blocks out all other content from the background by blacking out the rest of the page to allow the reader to focus more easily on the text set before them as an added extra.
Serious Readers
For readers of a rigorous interest in the literary movements of history from the Medieval, to the Renaissance, the 17th century and into the Restoration period, there is a vast and comprehensive selection of books, poetry and plays with detailed information from the Luminarium database.
This material is brought to the Luminarium organisation courtesy of a range of institutions pooling resources to contribute a great amount of specialist knowledge from the field of English literature, which also includes full text essays, poems and plays from each of these time periods.
Leisure Reading
For reading at a more leisurely pace in Free Ebooks well loved favourites are in plentiful supply, with stories readers will have come across in childhood or later adolescence. These include titles such as Alice in Wonderland, Robinson Crusoe, Tarzan of the Apes, Shakespeare's Hamlet, as well as The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to name but a few.
This site requests readers to download pdf files to access the stories and therefore can be easily stored on a computer hard drive to read at a time which best suits the reader. See:freebooks.html for further details of the site's interesting collection.
A Large Book Reading Choice at Bibliomania
A large number of more than 2,000 classic books in fiction, drama and poetry contained in a user friendly website, is Bibliomania. This site also includes articles and interviews, study guides and links to other resources.
To view Bibliomania visit: their site, for a broad range of interesting book titles. Some readers may find the screen difficult to read with a strikingly red background, but with high quality books and interesting content, there is plenty of good literature to choose from.
Alicia Rudd - Alicia enjoys literature which explores the connections between the romantic and the realistic, the mythicised and the ordinary. In ...
