Literature

english | 한국어

HowTo [ID# 211628]  +/-

Please add links for other literature collections you know about.

Multilingual

• Project Gutenberg

Languages with more than 50 books: Chinese Dutch English Finnish French German Italian Portuguese Spanish Tagalog

Languages with up to 50 books: Afrikaans Aleut Bulgarian Catalan Czech Danish Esperanto Friulano Gamilaraay Gascon Greek Hebrew Hungarian Icelandic Iloko Interlingua Irish Iroquoian Japanese Khasi Korean Latin Lithuanian Mayan Languages Middle English Nahuatl Napoletano-Calabrese North American Indian Norwegian Old English Polish Romanian Russian Sanskrit Serbian Slovak Swedish Welsh Yiddish

Note that Project Gutenberg only verifies the copyright status of the books it distributes in the U.S., and many books in its collection may be still restricted by copyrights in other countries.

• Project Runeberg Project Runeberg is patterned after Project Gutenberg, and presents free, out of copyright, Nordic/Scandinavian literature, periodicals and music in Dansk/Danish; English; íslenska/Icelandic; Latin; Norsk/Nynorsk/Norwegian; Svenska/Swedish.

• Google Books Beta Project description Search books in copyright, download books out of copyright; will eventually include all languages in libraries digitized. I found works in Old French. modern German and Classical Greek in a quick search.

• Wikibooks English, Deutsch, Français, Español, Português, Polski, Italiano, Nederlands, Magyar, עברית

(Note: do not mistake the commercial wikibook.org for this Wikipedia site.)

• Wikimedia Commons 903,307 media files in Oct. 2006

Alemannisch | Aragonés | العربية (Arabic) | Asturianu | Català | Česky | Cymraeg (Welsh) | Deutsch | Ελληνικά (Greek) | English | Español | Français | Gaeilge | Galego | Bahasa Indonesia | Italiano | 日本語 (Japanese) | 한국어 (Korean) | עברית (Hebrew) | Latine | Lëtzebuergesch | Lietuvių | Magyar (Hungarian) | Bahasa Melayu | Plattdüütsch | Nederlands | Norsk (nynorsk) | Norsk (bokmål) | Polski | Português | Русский (Russian) | Slovenčina (Slovak) | Slovenščina (Slovenian) | Sunda | Suomi (Finnish) | Svenska | ภาษาไทย (Thai) | 简体中文 (Simplified Chinese) | 繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese) | 廣東話

Беларуская (Belarusian| Brezhoneg | Български (Bulgarian) | Dansk | Eald Englisc | Eesti | Esperanto | Euskara | فارسی (Farsi) | Føroyskt | ગુજરાતી | हिन्दी | Hrvatski | Interlingua | Íslenska | Қазақша (Kazakh) | ಕನ್ನಡ (Kannada) | Kapampangan | Молдовеняскэ (Moldovan) | Nedersaksisch (NL) | Română | Seeltersk | Shqip (Albanian) | Српскоhrvatski (Serbo-Croatian) | Српски (Serbian)| தமிழ் (Tamil) | Українська (Ukrainian) | Tiếng Việt | Türkçe

• Manybooks offers free books in languages including: Afrikaans, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Finnish, French, Gamilaraay, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Interlingua, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Middle English, Nahuatl, Norwegian, Polish, Português, Romanian, Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, Welsh.

• Qur'an in 23 languages

• Stanford OperaGlass Italian, French, Russian, German, English, others

• The Lied and Art Song Texts Page Italian, French, Russian, German, English, others

• Thesaurus Literaturae Buddhicae Sanskrit, Chinese, Tibetan, English

• Electronic Resources for the Study of Buddhist Texts

• Online searchable Bible in 50 languages

• Complete or partial Bibles have been published in nearly 2000 languages by organizations such as The Bible Society of the UK; Wycliffe Bible Translators; The Christian Science Publishing Society. There is no central site where they can be accessed, but they are rather easy to Google. "Bible swahili" will get you links to several New Testaments and a whole Bible on the first page.

English, (mainly)

• E-book portal, Ron's Buchanan hyperlink treasury

Chinese

CBETA 中華電子佛典協會 Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association, in Chinese

French

• WikiBooks (Wikilivres) and WikiSource
• Ebooks libres et gratuits

Arabic

• WikiBooks and WikiSource

German

• Projekt Gutenberg DE Yes, the German version of Project Gutenberg
• Bach Cantata texts and translations

Classical Greek

• Perseus project

Pali

• Chaṭṭha Saṅgāyana Tipiṭaka - Unicode Version Romanized
• Tipiṭaka and Pāḷi Texts Devanagari, Burmese, Romanized; CD-ROM
• Digital Pali Reader GPL software; Romanized

Portuguese

• Obras de Domínio Público

A "digital library" based on open-source software and run by the University of Sao Paulo (USP). Allows you to search registered works by author, title, keyword, and language, and supposedly category as well, although as of 1/22 that feature was not functional (so it's unclear how much child-centered content is available). According to the official statistics, the site currently has over 30000 registered works. Downloads are in PDF format and can be freely redistributed, but not altered.

• Livros Clássicos

This page seems to be aimed more at university students. Has articles and books on a number of topics, and content may be used for non-commercial purposes as long as the source and author are cited. Works are downloadable in PDF. Includes a number of works that are often required reading for the vestibulares (university entrance exams).

• Livros Universia Brasil

Modest selection of works in Portuguese available for download in PDF format. According to the site there are over 500 books available, including works by Shakespeare, Voltaire, Cicero, and Aristotle. While most of the titles are in the public domain, some (such as Orwell's Animal Farm) are not, and it is unclear under what terms (if any) they are licensed.

• Biblioteca Virtual do Estudante

USP (University of Sao Paulo) virtual library. Has a respectable collection of material -- texts (sorted by literature, biography, instructional material, periodicals, and academic theses), and a wide range of audio (including audiobooks), images, and video. Some written works are downloadable in PDF format, while some are simply webpages. The licensing terms seem to vary throughout the site: in many instances they are not specified, although in some cases it is noted that the Copyright Law (9.610) applies and that the authors must be contacted before certain uses can be made of a work (contact information is given).

• Monteiro Lobato

Website about the writer, his life and work. There isn't any reproduction of his texts, but it's useful for researches about the author.

• Ruth Rocha

Has 19 stories available to read and one audio cd's worth of stories for listening (license terms are unspecified). Full-text versions of Ruth Rocha books are not available on the website -- the "books" function goes only to a list of published books that can be searched by title or publisher.

• IBGE 7 a 12 anos

The section of the Brazilian Insitute of Geography and Statistics website that is aimed, as the title would suggest, at children ages 7-12. Includes things like basic educational materials and maps that can be downloaded, printed, and saved (although licensing terms are not made explicit).

• Museu do Índio
• Biblioteca UOL
• Virtual Books Online
• Historinhas para Crianças
• Planetário
• IG Educação
• Fontes para Educação Infantil
• Mingau Digital

Spanish

Content in spanish can also be found in Spanish America's section.

Tibetan

• Asian Classics Input Project

Yiddish

• National Yiddish Book Center

"When the Center began, scholars estimated there were 70,000 Yiddish books still extant and recoverable. The Center recovered that number in six months and has gone on to recover 1.5 million volumes, with hundreds of additional books continuing to arrive each week. The Center’s achievement has been hailed as the 'the greatest cultural rescue effort in Jewish history.'"

Other directories

e-books.com.au

University of Virginia Library's E-text Center contains over 2100 titles, including classic British and American fiction, major authors, children's literature, American history, Shakespeare, African-American documents, the Bible, and a largish collection of material by/about Native Americans. Please note that the downloadable editions may not be able to be easily read as ebooks on the OLPC current build. However, all texts are available in HTML format.