Vox Day has identified another gap in the preservation of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. In this case, he’s noticed that there a number of what he considers fairly basic public domain history books unavailable at the normal places. He offers up Project Castaliaberg as a possible solution to this.

This got me to thinking about the various websites I’ve visited looking for free public domain books. I’ll comment briefly on each.

Project Gutenberg

https://gutenberg.org

The default. Most people who read ebooks have almost certainly heard of Project Gutenberg. Formats available for download (plain text, html, pdf, epub, mobi, etc.) are consistent across most of the library, but the quality and accuracy can sometimes be poor.

Standard Ebooks

https://standardebooks.org

This is non-profit volunteer-driven project that proof reads, corrects, and beautifully formats public domain texts into excellent ebooks. While this library is not nearly as big as Gutenberg, the ebooks are outstanding quality.

Loyal Books

http://www.loyalbooks.com/

This site is basically a merging of the titles available at Project Gutenberg with the free audiobooks created by LibriVox. A useful resource.

Internet Archive Books

https://archive.org/details/books

A hit or miss mess or millions of books in all manner of state, readability, language, etc. If you know exactly what you’re looking for and can’t find it anywhere else, you may find it here. You can filter by year, language, etc. A lot of hits lead you to paywalls or limited previews.

Unz Books

https://www.unz.com/book/

Ron Unz has cataloged a lot of “controversial” books here. Many of them are available at other places, but many are not. Unfortunately, most of these are only available as HTML format and downloading them is non-trivial.

Google Books

https://books.google.com

It’s Google. They cannot be trusted. But it is a resource.

UPDATE: Hat tip to Arthur on SG. Thanks for telling me about this.

Library Genesis

https://www.libgen.is

Library Genesis appears to be a searchable database of specifically scientific and technical ebooks. I browsed around a little and it looks like a valuable resource.

If you know of any other good resources, leave a comment over on gab or SG.