Last semester I took a theater class from the local public university, and one of the books that we had to read for the class was Romeo and Juliet. The campus bookstore was selling copies for around $20.00. I could have gotten the book for just a few dollars on Amazon.com, which is a great option for buying books, but in this case I decided to not pay a dime for the text, and it was all perfectly legal. No, I didn’t borrow it from the library, rather I just picked up a digital copy online for nothing! You too can get a bunch of free books online for literally nothing, and here’s how you can do it.
The book in question was public domain, meaning that the work belongs to no specific copyright holder. There might have been one at one time, but since the work is so old no one can legally claim copyright to it anymore. In most countries, a work can be copyrighted for 20 years before it goes into the public domain, however in the United States has a rather complex set of rules when dealing with copyrights. Any book published after 1923 becomes public domain 95 years after the date of publishing. Books published after 1978 go into the public domain 70 years after the author’s death. About 15% of all books are public domain.
Just because a book is a couple hundred of years old, does not mean it’s not worth reading. There are plenty of classics that everyone should read in their life, such as Plato’s The Republic, Shakespeare’s works, and many more.
Project Gutenberg is one of the primary places to attain free public domain books through the internet. It has a library of 17,000 books currently which include mostly classic literature. Project Gutenburg is a volunteer effort that hopes to digitalize, archive and distribute cultural works, and is currently the oldest digital library. It’s goal is to make classic works as free as possible in long lasting open formats that can be used by anyone.
Here are some books currently on Project Gutenburg that you might enjoy reading:
– The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci
– Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
– The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
– The Art of War by 6th cent. B.C. Sunzi
– Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
– Paradise Lost by John Milton
– Aesop’s Fables – Volume I by Aesop
– The Iliad by Homer
If reading books on your computer screen isn’t your favorite thing to do, you can also get free public domain audio books on the internet through LibriVox. The selection is not as great as that of Project Gutenburg’s, but their site is very easy to use and listening to audio books can be a very enjoyable activity for those with long commutes or who have to travel frequently.
You won’t find the latest novels at these sites, but that’s to be expected. You can still find a number of great works worth reading at zero cost, and you can’t beat that price!