Best place to find free public domain texts?

[doubleshuffle]

Originally Posted by WillAdams

The best aggregator for public domain (and legitimately freely available) books is:

http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/

Truly indispensable, but of course they usually link only to scans which must be OCRed and proofread before they become proper ebooks.

[GrannyGrump]

If you are ok with simply getting *loans*, give a try to OpenLibrary.org. This lending library is affiliated with archive.org. You can sign up for a free account (requires a valid email address, no other information), and can borrow books for 2-week period.

They only have the pdf scan, and epubs which are raw OCR from the the pdf (not proofed or well-formatted). But if you can stand reading in pdf, for titles you can't get hold of elsewhere, it is very useful.

[MartyTX]

Originally Posted by GrannyGrump

If you are ok with simply getting *loans* ...

Don't overlook your "local" library's electronic media services:

"Overdrive" - very good book selection
"3M Cloud Library" - okay selection
"Hoopla" - not quite there yet

Some large cities will give free or nominal-cost electronic memberships even if you live out of town. One requirement at all the libraries: patience! The waiting list can be quite long for a new release ... just like with "real" books from a bricks-and-mortar library.

[crich70]

Originally Posted by franklekens

The site I miss most is Munseys.com, but I suspect they also had material there that wasn't really out of copyright. Was that one of the reasons they closed down?

Munsey (under the Black Mask header) did at one time offer books like the Shadow series by Walter Gibson and the Doc Savage books by Lester Dent (on CD's) that Conde Nast claimed were owned by them. Of course I never heard of them (Conde Nast) actually offering said books (back then at least) to the consumer. Munsey removed those and other books like them (to avoid a costly court battle) and just went to books that (I think) were all PD books. Not sure why they went offline though. One day they were there and the next they were gone. No prior notice that they would be going offline or anything.

[khalleron]

For sheer volume you can't beat Google - literally millions of free PD books.

Now, they're all OCR scanned and not edited at all, but you can certainly find things there you can't find anywhere else. Just be prepared to read around OCR errors.

To me it's better than archive.org or Open Library - I find most of those books to be nearly unreadable. Google's OCR conversion is better, IMO.

[Toradtall]

girlebooks has quality content, but the selection can be specific (obvious reasons). I'll have to try some of those other sites you've linked.

[evanhson357]

Thanks for the tips. I'll have to check them out.

[grumbles]

Bibliowiki, formerly known as WikiLivres is another Canadian site that also has Canadian public domain material. This includes Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

Interesting, it just borrowed "The Collected Raymond Chandler" from the Toronto Public Library. It is a Penguin Random House book. The title page has this nice line: "This title is in the public domain in Canada and is not subject to any license or copyright." The same line also appears in the Hammett book.

[Political comment deleted - MODERATOR]