Free eBooks with Modern Typography & Nice Formatting, All “Carefully Produced for the True Book Lover”

If you look through our col­lec­tion of 800+ Free eBooks, you will find many pub­lic domain texts pre­sent­ed by providers like Project Guten­berg and Archive.org. Pret­ty soon, we’ll have to add texts from Stan­dard eBooks, a vol­un­teer-dri­ven project that dig­i­tizes books while plac­ing an empha­sis on design and typog­ra­phy. Here’s how they describe their mis­sion:

While there are plen­ty of places where you can down­load free and accu­rate­ly-tran­scribed pub­lic domain ebooks, we feel the qual­i­ty of those ebooks can often be great­ly improved.

For exam­ple, Project Guten­berg, a major pro­duc­er of pub­lic-domain ebooks, hosts epub and Kin­dle files that some­times lack basic typo­graph­ic neces­si­ties like curly quotes; some of those ebooks are auto­mat­i­cal­ly gen­er­at­ed and can’t take full advan­tage of mod­ern eread­er tech­nol­o­gy like pop­up foot­notes or pop­up tables of con­tents; they some­times lack niceties like cov­er images and title pages; and the qual­i­ty of indi­vid­ual ebook pro­duc­tions varies great­ly.

Archival sites like the Inter­net Archive (and even Project Guten­berg, to some extent) painstak­ing­ly pre­serve entire texts word-for-word, includ­ing orig­i­nal typos and ephemera that are of lim­it­ed inter­est to mod­ern read­ers: every­thing includ­ing cen­turies-old pub­lish­ing marks, adver­tise­ments for long-van­ished pub­lish­ers, author bios, deeply archa­ic spellings, and so on. Some­times all you get is a scan of the actu­al book pages. That’s great for researchers, archivists, and spe­cial-inter­est read­ers, but not that great for casu­al, mod­ern read­ers.

The Stan­dard Ebooks project dif­fers from those etext projects in that we aim to make free pub­lic domain ebooks that are care­ful­ly type­set, cleaned of ancient and irrel­e­vant ephemera, take full advan­tage of mod­ern eread­ing tech­nol­o­gy, are for­mat­ted accord­ing to a detailed style guide, and that are each held to a stan­dard of qual­i­ty and inter­nal con­sis­ten­cy. Stan­dard Ebooks include care­ful­ly cho­sen cov­er art based on pub­lic domain art­work, and are pre­sent­ed in an attrac­tive way on your ebook­shelf. For tech­ni­cal­ly-inclined read­ers, Stan­dard Ebooks con­form to a rig­or­ous cod­ing style, are com­plete­ly open source, and are host­ed on Github, so any­one can con­tribute cor­rec­tions or improve­ments eas­i­ly and direct­ly with­out hav­ing to deal with baroque forums or opaque process­es.

All of the ebooks in the Stan­dard eBooks col­lec­tion â€śare thought to be in the pub­lic domain in the Unit­ed States.” You can cur­rent­ly down­load 103 texts–for exam­ple titles like Jane Austen’s Pride and Prej­u­dice, Mary Shel­ley’s Franken­stein, short fic­tion by Philip K. Dick, and Niet­zsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. (See the full col­lec­tion here.) They offer ver­sions spe­cial­ly designed for the Kin­dle and Kobo, but also the more uni­ver­sal epub for­mat. If you’d like to pitch in and help Stan­dard eBooks dig­i­tize more aes­thet­i­cal­ly-pleas­ing books, get more infor­ma­tion here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free

135 Free Phi­los­o­phy eBooks

Down­load 243 Free eBooks on Design, Data, Soft­ware, Web Devel­op­ment & Busi­ness from O’Reilly Media

Down­load 464 Free Art Books from The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art

Read 700 Free eBooks Made Avail­able by the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia Press

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36 eBooks on Computer Programming from O’Reilly Media: Free to Download and Read

This past week, we fea­tured a free course on the pro­gram­ming lan­guage Python, pre­sent­ed by MIT. A handy resource, to be sure.

And then it struck us that you might want to com­ple­ment that course with some of the 36 free ebooks on com­put­er pro­gram­ming from O’Reilly Media–of which 7 are ded­i­cat­ed to Python itself. Oth­er books focus on Java, C++, Swift, Soft­ware Archi­tec­ture, and more. See the list of pro­gram­ming books here.

If you’re look­ing for yet more free ebooks from O’Reilly Media, see the post in our archive: Down­load 243 Free eBooks on Design, Data, Soft­ware, Web Devel­op­ment & Busi­ness from O’Reilly Media.\

For more com­put­er sci­ence resources, see our col­lec­tions:

Free Online Com­put­er Sci­ence Cours­es

Free Text­books: Com­put­er Sci­ence

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Learn Python: A Free Online Course from Google

Free Online Com­put­er Sci­ence Cours­es

Learn Python with a Free Online Course from MIT

800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices

Download 243 Free eBooks on Design, Data, Software, Web Development & Business from O’Reilly Media

Last week we high­light­ed for you 20 Free eBooks on Design from O’Reilly Media. Lit­tle did we know that we were just scratch­ing the sur­face of the free ebooks O’Reil­ly Media has to offer.

If you head over to this page, you can access 243 free ebooks cov­er­ing a range of dif­fer­ent top­ics. Below, we’ve divid­ed the books into sec­tions (and pro­vid­ed links to them), indi­cat­ed the num­ber of books in each sec­tion, and list­ed a few attractive/representative titles.

You can down­load the books in PDF for­mat. An email address–but no cred­it card–is required. Again the com­plete list is here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load 20 Free eBooks on Design from O’Reilly Media

Read 700 Free eBooks Made Avail­able by the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia Press

A New Free eBook Every Month from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go Press

800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices

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Download 20 Free eBooks on Design from O’Reilly Media

oreilly-books

A quick note: Thanks to O’Reil­ly Media, you can now down­load 20 free ebooks focused on design–every­thing from Design­ing for Cities, to Design­ing for the Inter­net of Things, to Design Essen­tials. You can down­load the books in PDF for­mat. No cred­it card is required. See the com­plete list here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

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The New York Public Library Lets Patrons Download 300,000 eBooks

simply-e-phones_1

A quick heads up for read­ers in NYC. This sum­mer, The New York Pub­lic Library released a new app, called Sim­plyE, which gives its card­hold­ers the abil­i­ty to “browse, bor­row, and read more than 300,000 e‑books from the Library’s col­lec­tions in just a few easy steps.” If you’re among the 3.4 mil­lion peo­ple the NYPL exists to serve, you can down­load Sim­plyE for iPhone/iPad or Android, log in with your NYPL card bar­code and PIN, and start read­ing. Down the road, NYPL plans to make the app avail­able on Kin­dle Fire, and also to make books avail­able in mp3 for­mat.

For more infor­ma­tion on the app, click here. To dis­cov­er the best art books avail­able in Sim­plyE app, see this handy post by Hyper­al­ler­gic.

As always, you can down­load free books from our twin col­lec­tions: 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free and 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The New York Pub­lic Library Lets You Down­load 180,000 Images in High Res­o­lu­tion: His­toric Pho­tographs, Maps, Let­ters & More

Food­ie Alert: New York Pub­lic Library Presents an Archive of 17,000 Restau­rant Menus (1851–2008)

New York Pub­lic Library Puts 20,000 Hi-Res Maps Online & Makes Them Free to Down­load and Use

The British Library Puts 1,000,000 Images into the Pub­lic Domain, Mak­ing Them Free to Reuse & Remix

Enter an Archive of 6,000 Historical Children’s Books, All Digitized and Free to Read Online

5 Little PIgs

We can learn much about how a his­tor­i­cal peri­od viewed the abil­i­ties of its chil­dren by study­ing its chil­dren’s lit­er­a­ture. Occu­py­ing a space some­where between the pure­ly didac­tic and the non­sen­si­cal, most children’s books pub­lished in the past few hun­dred years have attempt­ed to find a line between the two poles, seek­ing a bal­ance between enter­tain­ment and instruc­tion. How­ev­er, that line seems to move clos­er to one pole or anoth­er depend­ing on the pre­vail­ing cul­tur­al sen­ti­ments of the time. And the very fact that children’s books were hard­ly pub­lished at all before the ear­ly 18th cen­tu­ry tells us a lot about when and how mod­ern ideas of child­hood as a sep­a­rate cat­e­go­ry of exis­tence began.

ABCs

“By the end of the 18th cen­tu­ry,” writes New­cas­tle Uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor M.O. Gren­by, “children’s lit­er­a­ture was a flour­ish­ing, sep­a­rate and secure part of the pub­lish­ing indus­try in Britain.” The trend accel­er­at­ed rapid­ly and has nev­er ceased—children’s and young adult books now dri­ve sales in pub­lish­ing (with 80% of YA books bought by grown-ups for them­selves).

Gren­by notes that “the rea­sons for this sud­den rise of children’s lit­er­a­ture” and its rapid expan­sion into a boom­ing mar­ket by the ear­ly 1800s “have nev­er been ful­ly explained.” We are free to spec­u­late about the social and ped­a­gog­i­cal winds that pushed this his­tor­i­cal change.

Afloat with Nelson

Or we might do so, at least, by exam­in­ing the children’s lit­er­a­ture of the Vic­to­ri­an era, per­haps the most inno­v­a­tive and diverse peri­od for children’s lit­er­a­ture thus far by the stan­dards of the time. And we can do so most thor­ough­ly by sur­vey­ing the thou­sands of mid- to late 19th cen­tu­ry titles at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Florida’s Bald­win Library of His­tor­i­cal Children’s Lit­er­a­ture. Their dig­i­tized col­lec­tion cur­rent­ly holds over 6,000 books free to read online from cov­er to cov­er, allow­ing you to get a sense of what adults in Britain and the U.S. want­ed chil­dren to know and believe.

Zig Zag

Sev­er­al gen­res flour­ished at the time: reli­gious instruc­tion, nat­u­ral­ly, but also lan­guage and spelling books, fairy tales, codes of con­duct, and, espe­cial­ly, adven­ture stories—pre-Hardy Boys and Nan­cy Drew exam­ples of what we would call young adult fic­tion, these pub­lished prin­ci­pal­ly for boys. Adven­ture sto­ries offered a (very colo­nial­ist) view of the wide world; in series like the Boston-pub­lished Zig Zag and Eng­lish books like Afloat with Nel­son, both from the 1890s, fact min­gled with fic­tion, nat­ur­al his­to­ry and sci­ence with bat­tle and trav­el accounts. But there is anoth­er dis­tinc­tive strain in the children’s lit­er­a­ture of the time, one which to us—but not nec­es­sar­i­ly to the Victorians—would seem con­trary to the impe­ri­al­ist young adult nov­el.

Bible Picture Book

For most Vic­to­ri­an stu­dents and read­ers, poet­ry was a dai­ly part of life, and it was a cen­tral instruc­tion­al and sto­ry­telling form in children’s lit. The A.L.O.E.’s Bible Pic­ture Book from 1871, above, presents “Sto­ries from the Life of Our Lord in Verse,” writ­ten “sim­ply for the Lord’s lambs, rhymes more read­i­ly than prose attract­ing the atten­tion of chil­dren, and fas­ten­ing them­selves on their mem­o­ries.” Chil­dren and adults reg­u­lar­ly mem­o­rized poet­ry, after all. Yet after the explo­sion in children’s pub­lish­ing the for­mer read­ers were often giv­en infe­ri­or exam­ples of it. The author of the Bible Pic­ture Book admits as much, beg­ging the indul­gence of old­er read­ers in the pref­ace for “defects in my work,” giv­en that “the vers­es were made for the pic­tures, not the pic­tures for the vers­es.”

Elfin Rhymes

This is not an author, or per­haps a type of lit­er­a­ture, one might sus­pect, that thinks high­ly of children’s aes­thet­ic sen­si­bil­i­ties.  We find pre­cise­ly the oppo­site to be the case in the won­der­ful Elfin Rhymes from 1900, writ­ten by the mys­te­ri­ous “Nor­man” with “40 draw­ings by Car­ton Moorepark.” Who­ev­er “Nor­man” may be (or why his one-word name appears in quo­ta­tion marks), he gives his read­ers poems that might be mis­tak­en at first glance for unpub­lished Christi­na Ros­set­ti vers­es; and Mr. Moorepark’s illus­tra­tions rival those of the finest book illus­tra­tors of the time, pre­sag­ing the high qual­i­ty of Calde­cott Medal-win­ning books of lat­er decades. Elfin Rhymes seems like a rare odd­i­ty, like­ly pub­lished in a small print run; the care and atten­tion of its lay­out and design shows a very high opin­ion of its read­ers’ imag­i­na­tive capa­bil­i­ties.

Elfin Rhymes 2

This title is rep­re­sen­ta­tive of an emerg­ing genre of late Vic­to­ri­an children’s lit­er­a­ture, which still tend­ed on the whole, as it does now, to fall into the trite and for­mu­la­ic. Elfin Rhymes sits astride the fan­ta­sy boom at the turn of the cen­tu­ry, her­ald­ed by huge­ly pop­u­lar books like Frank L. Baum’s Wiz­ard of Oz series and J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. These, the Har­ry Pot­ters of their day, made mil­lions of young peo­ple pas­sion­ate read­ers of mod­ern fairy tales, rep­re­sent­ing a slide even fur­ther away from the once quite nar­row, “remorse­less­ly instruc­tion­al… or deeply pious” cat­e­gories avail­able in ear­ly writ­ing for chil­dren, as Gren­by points out.

All Around the Moon

Where the bound­aries for kids’ lit­er­a­ture had once been nar­row­ly fixed by Latin gram­mar books and Pilgrim’s Progress, by the end of the 19th cen­tu­ry, the influ­ence of sci­ence fic­tion like Jules Verne’s, and of pop­u­lar super­nat­ur­al tales and poems, pre­pared the ground for com­ic books, YA dystopias, magi­cian fic­tion, and dozens of oth­er children’s lit­er­a­ture gen­res we now take for grant­ed, or—in increas­ing­ly large numbers—we buy to read for our­selves. Enter the Bald­win Library of His­tor­i­cal Children’s Lit­er­a­ture here, where you can browse sev­er­al cat­e­gories, search for sub­jects, authors, titles, etc, see full-screen, zoomable images of book cov­ers, down­load XML ver­sions, and read all of the over 6,000 books in the col­lec­tion with com­fort­able read­er views. Find more clas­sics in our col­lec­tion, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The First Children’s Pic­ture Book, 1658’s Orbis Sen­su­al­i­um Pic­tus

The Anti-Slav­ery Alpha­bet: 1846 Book Teach­es Kids the ABCs of Slavery’s Evils

The Inter­na­tion­al Children’s Dig­i­tal Library Offers Free eBooks for Kids in Over 40 Lan­guages

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

John Grisham Is Letting You Download His New Novel as a Free eBook

grisham novel free

FYI: Best­selling author John Grisham is giv­ing away his new nov­el called The Tumor: A Non-Legal Thriller. Avail­able as a free ebook on Ama­zon, Grisham has called The Tumor â€śthe most impor­tant book I’ve ever writ­ten.” And, as the sub­ti­tle sug­gests, this new book isn’t anoth­er one of those legal thrillers Grisham is known for. No, this nov­el focus­es on med­i­cine and how a “new med­ical tech­nol­o­gy could rev­o­lu­tion­ize the future of med­i­cine by cur­ing with sound.”

Here’s how the book is briefly sum­ma­rized on Ama­zon:

The Tumor fol­lows the present day expe­ri­ence of the fic­tion­al patient Paul, an oth­er­wise healthy 35-year-old father who is diag­nosed with a malig­nant brain tumor. Grisham takes read­ers through a detailed account of Paul’s treat­ment and his family’s expe­ri­ence that doesn’t end as we would hope. Grisham then explores an alter­nate future, where Paul is diag­nosed with the same brain tumor at the same age, but in the year 2025, when a treat­ment called focused ultra­sound is able to extend his life expectan­cy.

Focused ultra­sound has the poten­tial to treat not just brain tumors, but many oth­er dis­or­ders, includ­ing Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, hyper­ten­sion, and prostate, breast and pan­cre­at­ic can­cer…

Read­ers will get a taste of the nar­ra­tive they expect from Grisham, but this short book will also edu­cate and inspire peo­ple to be hope­ful about the future of med­ical inno­va­tion.

You can down­load Grisham’s book here, and find many oth­er free reads in our col­lec­tion, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices.

You can also see Grisham talk­ing about the mate­r­i­al in his nov­el at this TEDx talk.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

h/t Robin

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The Princeton Bitcoin Textbook Is Now Free Online

free princeton bitcoin textbook

Image by Jason Ben­jamin, via Flickr Com­mons

On the Free­dom to Tin­ker blog, Arvind Narayanan, a com­put­er sci­ence pro­fes­sor at Prince­ton, announced yes­ter­day:

The first com­plete draft of the Prince­ton Bit­coin text­book is now freely avail­able. We’re very hap­py with how the book turned out: it’s com­pre­hen­sive, at over 300 pages, but has a con­ver­sa­tion­al style that keeps it read­able.

If you’re look­ing to tru­ly under­stand how Bit­coin works at a tech­ni­cal lev­el and have a basic famil­iar­i­ty with com­put­er sci­ence and pro­gram­ming, this book is for you. Researchers and advanced stu­dents will find the book use­ful as well â€” start­ing around Chap­ter 5, most chap­ters have nov­el intel­lec­tu­al con­tri­bu­tions.

Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty Press is pub­lish­ing the offi­cial, peer-reviewed, pol­ished, and pro­fes­sion­al­ly done ver­sion of this book. It will be out this sum­mer. If you’d like to be noti­fied when it comes out, you should sign up here.

The Prince­ton Bit­coin text­book is already being used in Amer­i­can uni­ver­si­ty class­rooms (includ­ing at Stan­ford) and it’s also the text that sup­ports a Prince­ton Bit­coin course being taught on Cours­era.

You can now find it added to our col­lec­tion of Free Text­books.

via Boing­Bo­ing

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bit­coin, the New Decen­tral­ized Dig­i­tal Cur­ren­cy, Demys­ti­fied in a Three Minute Video

Harvard’s Free Com­put­er Sci­ence Course Teach­es You to Code in 12 Weeks

Cal­cu­lus Life­saver: A Free Online Course from Prince­ton

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.