Books and excerpts online

Create a reading list for yourself or your family on your computer without having to leave the comforts of home. The following sites offer access to thousands of book listings.

The Online Books Page

This site offers a search engine that provides access to more than 18,000 listings of entire books freely available on the Internet (many of them older texts with expired copyrights). The site is hosted by the University of Pennsylvania Library and maintained by a digital library planner and researcher.  These book lovers have also compiled several themed features including an outstanding compilation of major literary prize-winning books and a celebration of women writers.

Bartleby.com

The editors of Yahoo! Internet Life magazine named Bartleby.com the “Best Literary Resource” on the Web. This site offers free fiction and non-fiction books, short stories, poetry, and reference texts for research.

Project Gutenberg

This site aims to digitalize all books now in the public domain due to expired copyrights. Revisit the classics by William Shakespeare or Edgar Allan Poe or download a children’s favorite like Alice in Wonderland.

Children’s Books Online: the Rosetta Project

The Rosetta Project offers free access to 90 illustrated children’s classics such as Peter Rabbit and The Three Bears. Parents can download an entire book as a compressed zip file to store on the computer or to print out for bedtime stories. The site also offers books in multiple languages.

DearReader.com

Chapter-a-Day delivers free book excerpts to your e-mail address on a daily basis. The site’s purpose is to provide the “joy of reading” by giving you a taste of a new book each week. You can register to receive selections from the genre of your choice, and a new book is started each Monday

Other book excerpts—usually first chapters—are available at the sites of various newspapers and magazines including The New York Times

LINK