Good Online Sources for Free Books?

hydopower asks: "I recently stumbled upon a collection of online libraries. This was fascinating to me, but too many of them cost money or offer Google Print-like limited functionality. I decided to put together a list of sites that offer free books in a format that would allow a person to actually read through them. As Slashdot readers are known for being well read and for enjoying free things, I figured I'd tap into the knowledge pool here. Any suggestions?"

Comments

Perseus Project

[CyberVenom]

The Perseus project at Tufts is an excellent source of ancient literature, as well as some translations.

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/

If true classics are your thing. ;)

Esoteric texts

[tahuti]

http://www.sacred-texts.com/index.htm http://www.hermetic.com/ http://www.hermetics.org/library.html

A few options

[Xeo 024]

Check out your local library and see if they're registered with NetLibrary, it's free if your library is registered with them. They have a decent collection of books.

Adobe offers a few free ebooks, both fiction and non-fiction. However, let me warn you, they are DRM'd.

Then there is also the Gutenberg Project as many others have already mentioned.

If you are using MS Reader, then Microsoft offers some free books as well.

Bookcrossing.com

[mactov]

There's a nice little online book trading co-op at http://www.bookcrossing.com./ People share books, trade books, and "release books into the wild" to track them. Kinda fun.

Images

[Ankh]

I've been working on scanning images from antiquarian books for a few years, and recently started opening the process up so others can help out. The current state is at Pictures from old books; the new collaborative site will be fromoldbooks.org (since there are textual transcriptions as well as images), probably in a month or so.