Free books in English and Spanish
Wednesday, June 6th, 2007“Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.” –Pravin Lal
There are several places on the internet where you can find the full text to many different (mostly public domain) books in English and some in Spanish. If you like to read, go ahead and browse through the following list of the best places to find free books and texts on the net.
Project Gutenberg
This is a volunteer project to digitize, archive and distribute public domain books and writings. You can download the books as text files, or in several other formats. To find books, you can use the advanced search, where you can search by author, subject, title, language etc. Here’s a list of all the books they have in Spanish— over a 150. You can find famous novels such as Don Quijote and Don Juan Tenorio, and Doña Perfecta.
Universal Library
This is a project at Carnegie Mellon University which hopes to built a free-to-read, searchable electronic library of one million books. You can search right from the home page, or you can browse the collection. It’s not nearly as easy to use as the Gutenberg Project, but I recognize a few titles and authors.
Wikibooks
Wikibooks is similar to Wikipedia, but the goal is to write textbooks on every conceivable subject. There are many useful textbooks available, but note that this is not the place to find old public domain texts– These are new open-source books. You can also browse the Spanish version where you’ll probably find something you’d like to read. Note that many of the books are incomplete.
The European Library
This is a consortium of the national libraries of many European countries. When you do a search, select “online books and images” and the results will be books that you can read online and download. You can search by keyword, title, author etc. Try a search for “español” and then click the “See Online” button for any of the results.