Starting Places...     

Gale Virtual Reference Library   funded  by

Available from the home page under Online Databases as a collection of encyclopedias classified by Business, Education, Environment, History, Literature, Medicine, Multicultural Studies, Nation and World, Religion, Science, and Social Science.   R2Library , another collection, covers medicine, nursing and allied health. Yet another large collection of reference books in the humanities and social sciences can be found in Blackwell Reference Online
Individual and collection titles can be found in the Library Catalog. Tip: E-books is a Quick limit option in the Basic Search interface.

Internet Public Library Online Text Sites

"Rather than continuing to maintain its own index of online texts, the IPL is now pleased to recommend a number of other worthwhile resources for this information."

Metronet E-Book Project   

An introduction to finding books on the Internet, it provides informed descriptions of selected E-book Mega-sites (many are listed below) and tips for searching.

Online Books Page

Search or browse by author, by title, or by Library of Congress Classification for more than 18,000 English works on the Internet. Includes a number of archives and indexes for other languages and features A Celebration of Women Writers, Banned Books Online, and Prize Winners Online from the top-level page.

Oxford Digital Reference Shelf   

Currently available via Books or Find Books and Media on the home page are only two titles from the collection, the Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History and the Oxford Encyclopedia of Children's Literature. Tip: E-books is a Quick limit option in the Basic Search interface.

General Collections

Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts

"...a collection of public domain documents from American and English literature as well as Western philosophy."

American Memory Collections: Original Format: Books & Other Printed Texts

But one section of the Library of Congress "site [that] offers more than 7 million digital items from more than 100 historical collections."

Athena

"...10,000 links to books on philosophy, science, classics, literature, history, economics, etc."

Bartleby.com: Great Books Online

Offers classics in reference, verse, fiction, and nonfiction.

Berkeley Digital Library SunSITE Digital Collections

A wide variety of text and image collections including the Online Archive of California composed of the Japanese American Relocation Digital Archive, the Free Speech Movement Digital Archive, and 100 oral history transcripts.

Bibliomania

From the UK, an "educational resource with the full text of classic world literature and important non-fiction texts supported by an extensive reference section."

Cornell University Library Digital Collections 

Scroll the page to view image links to collections. Most collections are freely available.

Ebooks

Over 2,100 publicly-available ebooks from the University of Virginia Library's Etext Center, including classic British and American fiction, major authors, children's literature, American history, Shakespeare, African-American documents, the Bible, and much more.

Electronic Literature Directory

"A descriptive guide to 2353 works, 1196 authors, and 193 publishers..."

English Online Resources

Many of the collections at the University of Virginia Electronic Text Center

are clearly restricted to U. of Virginia users,  but many are not

EServer

"A growing online community where hundreds of writers, artists, editors and scholars gather to publish works as open archives, available free of charge to readers."

Great Books

Chronologically arranged, it is "a compilation of over 240 great authors and their works." 

Humanities Text Initiative

From the University of Michigan, it consists of 1)text collections 2)Making of America and 3)sgml resources.

Internet Classics Archive

"...441 works of classical literature by 59 different authors, including user-driven commentary and "reader's choice" Web sites. Mainly Greco-Roman works (some Chinese and Persian), all in English translation."

National Academies Press

Over 3,000 free books in all subjects.

Oxford Text Archive

"Public domain texts will be freely available from the online-catalogue and may be downloaded in a number of different formats."

Project Gutenberg

Downloadable files of classic texts in the public domain (generally published before 1923). Includes audio ebooks under Special Areas in the Site Map.

University of California Press eScholarship Editions

400 of over 1,400 online titles covering a range of topics in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences are available.

Specialized Collections

African American Women Writers of the 19th Century

A collection of books and pamphlets published prior to 1920 by black women writers.

Archive for the History of Economic Thought

Browse by author "representative texts of all of the major thinkers and schools of thought; and most of the sub-fields of economics."

Avalon Project at Yale Law School

Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy from 3000 BCE - 21st Century.

British Poetry 1780-1910: A Hypertext Archive of Scholarly Editions

An electronic library of marked up and scholarly editions of books poetry at the Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library.

British Women Romantic Poets, 1789-1832

"E-text editions of poetry by British and Irish women....that are not readily accessible from other sources."

Celt: Corpus of Electronic Texts

Consists of Irish "contemporary and historical texts from many areas, including literature and the other arts."  Search the database or browse using the "Published" link.

Classics in the History of Psychology

"historically significant public domain documents from the scholarly literature of psychology" consisting of over 25 books, about 200 articles and chapters, and links to over 200 relevant works at other sites.

Cornell Library Historical Mathematics Monographs

A scanned collection of selected monographs with expired copyrights.

Cornell Library Historical Monographs

Includes 456 General monographs (441 are available for online viewing only) and 691 New York State Historical pamphlets and monographs.

Digital Scriptorium

An image database of medieval and renaissance manuscripts held by Bancroft Library (UC Berkeley) and the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Columbia University.

Dime Novels and Penny Dreadfuls

"Stanford's Dime Novel and Story Paper Collection consists of over 8,000 individual items....flourish[ing] from the middle to the close of the 19th century in America and England." 

Documenting the American South

"a collection of sources on Southern history, literature and culture from the colonial period through the first decades of the 20th century."

Episteme Links

The "Electronic Texts" section "provides a database of over 2100 links to electronic texts by famous philosophers throughout history."

Incunabula Database

"...typeset and printed by hand from moveable type. Incunabula reflect the transitional phase between the manuscript and print traditions."

International Children's Digital Library

"The mission of the ICDL is to select, collect, digitize, and organize children's materials in their original languages and to create appropriate technologies for access and use by children 3-13 years old."

Internet Sacred Texts Archive

A "non-profit archive of electronic texts about religion, mythology, legends and folklore, and occult and esoteric topics. Texts are presented in English translation and, in some cases, in the original language."

Literature@SunSITE

"A collection of literature, largely U.S. authors" at the Berkeley Digital Library.

Luminarium

A multimedia anthology of medieval, renaissance, and 17th century works of English literature.

Making of America Books

"a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. The book collection currently contains approximately 10,000 books and 50,000 journal articles  with 19th century imprints."

Mysticism: Texts and Text Collections

Covers "traditional and modern spiritualities."

Old English Pages: Texts and MSS

An index to electronic editions of Old English texts, translations, and images of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts available on the Web.

Online Medieval and Classical Library

Search or browse by title, author, genre, or language "a collection of some of the most important literary works of Classical and Medieval civilization."

Representative Poetry On-line

"...about 3,162 English poems by over 400 poets from Caedmon, in the Old English period, to the work of living poets today."

Safari Tech Books Online    

One hundred seventy-two selected computer and business titles are available from ProQuest's "premiere electronic reference library for programmers and IT professionals."

Samuel May Anti-Slavery Collection

An extensive collection of materials documenting the abolitionist movement and the Civil War.

Victorian Women Writers Project

Anthologies, novels, political pamphlets, religious tracts, children's books, and volumes of poetry and verse drama by British women writers of the 19th century.

Wright American Fiction 1851-1875

2,887 volumes included (1,763 unedited, 1,124 fully edited and encoded) by 1,456 authors.

Audio Books

Librivox

LibriVox provides free audiobooks from the public domain.

Open Culture: Audio Book Podcast Collection

Open Culture lists over 50 free individual titles and links to other audio collections.