Santa left a new Kindle, iPad or other media player under your tree. He did his job. Now we’ll do ours. We’ll tell you how to fill those devices with free intelligent media — great books, movies, courses, and all of the rest. And if you didn’t get a new gadget, fear not. You can access all of these materials on the good old fashioned computer. Here we go:
Free eBooks: You have always wanted to read the great works. And now is your chance. When you dive into our Free eBooks collection you will find 300 great works by some classic writers (Dickens, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare and Tolstoy) and contemporary writers (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, and Kurt Vonnegut). The collection also gives you access to the 51-volume Harvard Classics. Read these foundational texts, and you’ll be well on your way to giving yourself a proper liberal education.
If you need help loading files to your eBook reader, Project Gutenberg provides tutorials here, and one of our previous posts explains how to upload files specifically to your Kindle.
Free Audio Books: What better way to spend your free time than listening to some of the greatest books ever written? This page contains a vast number of free audio books, including works by Arthur Conan Doyle, James Joyce, Jane Austen, Edgar Allan Poe, George Orwell and more recent writers — Italo Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov, Raymond Carver, etc. You can download these classic books straight to your mp3 player, then listen as you go.
[Note: If you're looking for a more recent book, you can download one free audio book from Audible.com. Grab that new Steve Jobs biography, or pretty much any other audio book you want. Find details on Audible's no-strings-attached deal here.]
Free Courses: This list brings together over 400 free courses from leading universities, including Stanford, Yale, MIT, UC Berkeley, Oxford and beyond. These full-fledged courses range across all disciplines – history, physics, philosophy, psychology and beyond. All of these courses are available in audio, and roughly 65% are available in video. You can’t receive credits or certificates for these courses. But the amount of personal enrichment you will derive here is immeasurable.
Free Movies: With a click of a mouse, or a tap of your touch screen, you will have access to 435 great movies. The collection hosts many classics, westerns, indies, documentaries, silent films and film noir favorites. It features work by some of our great directors (Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Andrei Tarkovsky, Stanley Kubrick, Jean-Luc Godard and David Lynch) and performances by cinema legends: John Wayne, Jack Nicholson, Audrey Hepburn, Charlie Chaplin, and beyond. On this one page, you will find thousands of hours of cinema bliss.
Free Language Lessons: Perhaps learning a new language is high on your list of 2012 New Year’s resolutions. Well, here is a great way to do it. Take your pick of 40 languages, including Spanish, French, Italian, Mandarin, English, Russian, Dutch, even Finnish, Yiddish and Esperanto. These lessons are all free and ready to download.
Free Textbooks: And one last item for the lifelong learners among you. We have scoured the web and pulled together a list of 150 Free Textbooks. It’s a great resource particularly if you’re looking to learn math, computer science or physics on your own. There might be a diamond in the rough here for you.
Thank Santa, maybe thank us, and enjoy that new device….
Hi Dan,
Thanks for your list of free resources.
I especially like the free movies section. You even have Bruce Lee’s fist of fury! heyy ya! My ipad loves you :-)
Cheers
Matt
Hey Dan,
Just to let you and your readers know, you can get daily Kindle freebies by following Kindle tracker sites, like the free http://www.daily-free-ebooks.com . Enjoy your new toys :-D.
Hi Dan,
thanks for the great post. Since I have tons of PDF files I want to read I searched and found this tool to get them nicely converted to be readable on my Kindle. http://calibre-ebook.com/
I hop this helps others too
cheers
Rolf
Android??
You forgot to mention public libraries. Many libraries now offer free ebooks that can be downloaded through their website. They work with many different ereaders. Check your local library’s website to determine if this is available in your area.
Another free textbook – this one over copyright issues – is Copyright and Cultural Institutions. It’s aimed at copyright issues for libraries, archives, museums, etc., but there is a ton of good information for the rest of us. Of course, the site is down for maintenance for a coupe of days, so you’ll have to wait a short time. . .
https://ssrn.com/abstract=1495365
Why don’t we get these on Blackberry, I don’t have an iphone or ipad.
And I think to myself… what a wonderful world.”