These sites offer ebooks and other resources to download or read online. Many of the sources are public domain, Creative Commons, or open source books; others are under copyright, but have been published for free online by their creators for personal use.

Classics

• The Online Books Page: The University of Pennsylvania hosts this book search and database.
• Project Gutenberg: Tens of thousands of free books in English, Portuguese, French, and German.
• Classic Reader: Online library of thousands of free books by authors such as Dickens, Austen, Shakespeare and many others.
• Read Print: From George Orwell to Alexandre Dumas to George Eliot to Charles Darwin, this online library is stocked with the best classics.
• Bartleby: Bartleby has much more than just the classics, but its collection of anthologies and other important novels made it famous.
• Open Culture: Free ebooks, audiobooks, textbooks, language lessons, and more.
• Kindle: Free classics and others available for Amazon Kindle.

Textbooks

• Wikibooks: Nearly 3,000 open source textbooks on a variety of topics.
• MIT Open Courseware Supplemental Resources: Free videos, textbooks and more on the subjects of mechanical engineering, mathematics, chemistry and more.

Children's Books

• ByGosh: Free illustrated children’s books and stories.
• International Children's Digital Library: Over 4,600 children's books in 59 languages.
• Epic! Unlimited: Free access to thousands of books for teachers (for school use only).
• DK Find Out!: Online encyclopedia for kids.
• Toon Book Read: Read graphic novels for kids from Toon Books online.
• Storyline Online: Videos of celebrities reading picture books aloud.

Philosophy, Religion, & Folklore

• Ideology.us: Works by Rene Descartes, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, David Hume and others.
• Internet Sacred Text Archive: Freely available archive of online books about religion, mythology, folklore and the esoteric.
• Twilit Grotto: Archives of Western Esoterica: Renaissance era grimoires, esoteric texts, and occult philosophy.
• Buddhist e-Library: A variety of ebooks related to different Buddhist traditions and practices.
• Access to Insight: Library of readings related to Theravada Buddhism.
• Al-Islam.org: Over 1500 free books and articles about Islam and the Muslim people.
• Sefaria: Jewish texts in English and Hebrew.
• Perseus Digital Library: Tufts’ Perseus Digital Library features titles from Ancient Rome and Greece, published in English and original languages.
• Icelandic Saga Database: Online resource dedicated to the digital publication of the Sagas of the Icelanders.

Drama, Poetry, & Art

• The Complete Works of William Shakespeare: Shakespeare's plays and poetry provided by MIT.
• MetPublications: Five decades of Met publications on art history.
• Google Poetry: Google Books has a large selection of poetry, fromThe Canterbury Tales to Beowulf to Walt Whitman.
• Poetry Foundation: Search over 40,000 poems by subject, occasion, school/period, or keywords.
• Poets.org: Search over 6,500 poems by occasion, theme, and form, or search by keyword or poet’s name.
• Go Into The Story: Over 100 contemporary movie scripts downloadable as PDF.

More

• LibriVox: Free public domain audiobooks.
• Lit2Go: Free online collection of stories and poems in audiobook format with full text and PDF available for download.
• World Digital Library: Over 14,000 items from 190 countries.

Portions of this list adapted from "Free Books: 100 Legal Sites to Download Literature," http://iheartintelligence.com/2014/08/31/free-books-100-legal-sites-download-literature/.