Open Access and More
Books in the Public Domain (free from copyright)
Books and other works in the public domain may be freely accessed. In the USA, this means works published prior to 1927. Some books may be made open access under specified conditions, or thanks to the generosity of the authors and/or publishers. However, please note that we cannot offer access to any copyrighted books unless the publisher or copyright owner has so permitted. Please remember to correctly CITE any works that you reference in assignments or publications.
Open Access eBook Databases
- eBooks from your librarycheck SHU Libraries' complete listing of subscribed (copyrighted) eBooks as well as open access eBooks (you can filter by database type "open access")
eBook regional and specialized collections
Other Free Books on the Web
Google Books. Allows users to search the full text of books that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical character recognition, and stored in its digital database. Some books in the public domain are available full text; copyrighted books allow 'snippet views'.. See
National Academies Press. Offers more than 4,000 titles in PDF format. All of these PDFs can be downloaded for free by the chapter or the entire book. There are also purchase options.
The Online Books Page
This site from the University of Pennsylvania provides more than 14,000 books free in various formats. Most are older works, but you will find some classic titles here.