Public Domain & Open Books

The single largest free source of literature on Earth is Standard Ebooks + Project Gutenberg + Internet Archive + LibriVox + HathiTrust. They cover almost everything published before ~1929 (and yearly more, as US copyright expires). All are free, all are non-commercial / public-interest, and all integrate cleanly with the FOSS reader stack via OPDS or direct EPUB download. Pair with DRM & Format Conversion (Calibre), KOReader, OPDS Protocol, and Self-Host Libraries.

Free first

Before you pay for an ebook subscription, fill your e-reader from the public domain. A subscription to Standard Ebooks' OPDS feed in KOReader is free and gives you literally hundreds of carefully typeset classics for the rest of your life.

Standard Ebooks (the polished default)

• ★ ★ Standard Ebooks — free OSS; takes Gutenberg books and professionally typesets them: proper smart quotes, italics, semantic markup, cover art, modern EPUB. Smaller catalog (~1000+) but each is beautifully produced. Subscribe to the OPDS feed in KOReader — https://standardebooks.org/opds — and your e-reader is permanently stocked with classics.
  • https://standardebooks.org
• Standard Ebooks "Latest" RSS — free; track new releases.

Project Gutenberg

• ★ ★ Project Gutenberg — free; ~70K public-domain books in EPUB / MOBI / HTML / TXT; the canonical source since 1971; ugly UI but the data is gold. OPDS catalogue available.
  • https://www.gutenberg.org
• ★ Project Gutenberg AI-narrated audiobooks — free; experimental Microsoft + MIT collaboration since 2023; auto-narration of Gutenberg ebooks. See Audiobooks.
• Project Gutenberg Australia / Canada / Europe — free; jurisdiction-specific (slightly different copyright term + entries).
• Distributed Proofreaders — free volunteer effort that produces Gutenberg books.

Internet Archive / Open Library

• ★ ★ Internet Archive (archive.org) — free; ~30M+ books, music, films, software, websites; "Open Library" lets you borrow scanned in-copyright books (post-Hachette-lawsuit changes — flag honestly: the Controlled Digital Lending model lost a major US court case in 2023, so the in-copyright lending volume has been reduced; the public-domain catalogue is unaffected).
  • https://archive.org
• ★ Open Library — free; same org; book-shape interface to the IA.
• Internet Archive Scholar — free; academic-focused.

LibriVox (free public-domain audiobooks)

• ★ ★ LibriVox — free OSS / volunteer; public-domain audiobooks; 17K+ titles; variable quality but extraordinary breadth. The free audiobook default. See Audiobooks.
  • https://librivox.org
• Loyal Books — free; LibriVox aggregator with cleaner UI.

HathiTrust

• ★ HathiTrust — free for in-copyright snippet view; full-text + download for affiliated university users; ~17M digitised volumes from research libraries.
  • https://www.hathitrust.org

Google Books

• Google Books — free; mostly snippet / preview; some full-text public domain. Closed source, ad-supported, and Google-data-give-up flagged.

Other public-domain sources (free)

• ★ Wikisource — free OSS; multilingual public-domain + open-license; CC-BY-SA wrapper.
• Manybooks.net — free; Gutenberg mirror with cleaner UI.
• Feedbooks Public Domain — free; nicely-formatted EPUBs; OPDS catalogue.
• Faded Page (Canada) — free; Canadian-jurisdiction public-domain.
• The Online Books Page (UPenn) — free; classic literature index.
• Open Culture's Free eBooks — free; curated.
• MIT OpenCourseWare — free; textbooks for many courses.

Library-flavoured (free)

• HathiTrust Digital Library (university affiliated) — free.
• Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) — free; aggregator across US libraries / archives.

Genre-specific public domain

• ★ Sacred Texts (sacred-texts.com) — free; religious / occult / folklore. See Spiritual & Meditation.
• SuttaCentral — free OSS; Buddhist canon. See Buddhist Canon Apps.
• Sefaria — free OSS; Jewish texts. See Spiritual Jewish / Sefaria.

Modern open-licensed (CC, not just public domain)

• ★ Open Textbook Library — free; CC-licensed textbooks. See Open Educational Resources.
• ★ OpenStax — free; CC-licensed college textbooks.
• Pressbooks (open) — free; OER publishing.

Anna's Archive / shadow libraries (not recommended)

• See DRM & Format Conversion — we don't recommend these. Public-domain sources above cover an enormous portion of literary canon for free, legally.

Patterns

• ★ Subscribe to Standard Ebooks OPDS in KOReader. Best free reader-stack pattern of 2026.
• ★ Standard Ebooks > raw Gutenberg for any classic that exists in both. The typesetting difference is night-and-day on an e-reader.
• Send to Kindle / Kobo — every Gutenberg / SE book has direct EPUB; sideload in 30s.
• Calibre's "Get news" + Gutenberg recipe — free; daily classic-of-the-day to your Kindle.
• Public-domain audiobook — LibriVox; combine with Standard Ebooks for read-and-listen via Storyteller.
• Self-host mirror — drop your favourite SE / Gutenberg books into Calibre Web Automated; serve to family via OPDS.

Pick this if…

• Default free classics, polished: Standard Ebooks (subscribe to OPDS).
• Largest catalogue: Project Gutenberg.
• Scanned older books / out-of-print: Internet Archive / Open Library.
• Free public-domain audio: LibriVox.
• University affiliation: HathiTrust.
• Open-licensed textbooks: OpenStax + OER.