List of Books That Are Public Domain

If you want to find public domain books, one option is to go to your local library or university library. However, most people today would prefer to search online for libraries or books. Here are some great sites that have a list of books that are public domain:

Project Gutenberg
Authorama
Bartleby
Bibliomania
Digital Book Index
Google Book Search
Internet Archive - Children’s Library
Internet Archive - Million Book Project
Timeless Truths

Project Gutenberg

The Project Gutenberg catalog gives you the ability to browse the online book catalog by author, title, language, or books that have recently posted or updated.

Languages with at least 50 books are: Chinese, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and Tagalog.
Categories include text books, audio books, compilations, data, music (recorded and sheet), and pictures (moving and still).
There is also a Top 100 Books list and links to other search engines.

This site has over 10,000 free electronic texts, from fairy tales to Shakespeare.

Autorama

Authorama has HTML books that are web page versions of the Project Gutenberg "Plain Vanilla ASCII" eTexts. All the books and illustrations are public domain.

Bartleby

Bartleby has classic works of fiction and nonfiction plus poetry and a reference section. This makes it a good site for research. Offerings include: Emily Dickinson, Poetry Anthologies, US Inaugural addresses, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, and Proverbs and Maxims.

Bibliomania

Bibliomania offers more than 2000 classics, book notes, poetry, drama, short stories, study guides, nonfiction, and reference books.

Digital Book Index

Digital Book Index has links to 165,000 full-text digital books from more than 1800 commercial and non-commercial publishers, universities, and some private sites. Almost all of them, around 140,000, are free. Some of the books are from these categories: reference, literature, language, history, social sciences, medicine, math, science, philosophy, religion, law, the arts, and children’s books.

Google Book Search

Google Book Search allows the user to search by author, title, era, or subject. When you see a book that interests you, simply click on the title. If the book is in the public domain, the whole book is available to you.

Internet Archive Children's Library

Internet Archive - Children’s Library has items for children from three to thirteen years of age which includes international books. You can browse by author, title, keywords, or language. The purpose of the site is to help children understand the world in which they live and their part in the global society.

Internet Archive Million Books Project

Internet Archive - Million Book Project has over 13,000 books so far that you can browse by title, author, collection, and keywords. There are also reviews and a forum.

Timeless Truths

Timeless Truths has the goal of “spreading the timeless truths revealed in God’s Word.” The site has religious texts, devotionals, biographies, true-to-life stories, sermons, tracts, hymns, and more.

Public Domain

Now that you have a list of public domain books, it is helpful to know what public domain means. Public domain is defined as property rights that are held by the public. It can be ideas, information, or works that are available for use by anyone. This can include music, movies, copyrights, patents, designs, images, software, etc.

There are several ways that a creative work can be added to the public domain. One is for the copyright to expire and another is if the copyright was not renewed by its owner. Also, the owner of a work has the option to allow his work into the public domain, called dedication. Finally, in some instances, there is no copyright protection that is available for that kind of work.