“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.

We all like free right? So instead of dropping your hard-earned cash on a pricey Spanish course, try out these free resources. Your library might not have all of these materials, but if you look, they are sure to have some of them. If you live in an area with a lot of Spanish-speaking people, your library should have lots of material. So just look through the list and head on down to the library.

Material in Spanish for you to practice your Spanish with

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After posting a couple of days ago about my daughter’s bilingual escapades, I thought I’d share some of the material I’ve read in my quest to learn about raising bilingual children.

I’ve been researching and looking for materials to help with raising our daughter bilingual in Spanish and English. If any of you are doing– or planning to do something similar, these books have helped us and they just might help you. Each book has the title, author and ISBN so you can easily find them or order them through your local bookstore. I’ve also put a link to buy them via Amazon, if you’re into that. Added benefit– you’re supporting Tomisimo if you buy them through the link to Amazon.

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