Free public domain ebooks in PDf, ePub, mobi formats
globalgreyebooks.com
globalgreyebooks.com
I was so scared to post a link here. Someone suggested I should a few weeks ago, but although I read this site quite a lot, I never thought to post my site. I am not really tech minded, and my site is quite simple.
But last night, I thought - ok, just do it. So I posted this, and went off to bed (in the UK). Woke up at 2.30am and saw many notifications for sales, and just ended up getting up.
So thank you. I love doing the site, and I hope you all find it useful :)
However, I also noticed a complication. In your FAQ, you state “However, I DO take issue with people just taking all my ebooks, and offering them on their own site, as is, and not taking out my logo and website name first. Please don't do this. If you take out my logo and website name - fair enough - but if you don't, please bear in mind this is then copyright infringement.” That should also be made clear in each book.
Further, I’m not sure if you can really say that your website name is copyrighted. You can trademark a website name, but I’m pretty sure you can’t say it is copyrighted. I could be wrong — IANAL — & will happily stand correction.
In the footer of Standard Ebooks, it says: “Content produced by or for Standard Ebooks L3C is dedicated to the public domain via the CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. Content not produced by or for Standard Ebooks L3C but displayed on this website may be subject to copyright.” (https://standardebooks.org/) Perhaps that sort of contrast would be a guide (not necessarily about your website’s content, but as a guide to separating things out). While there, you might want to take a look at https://standardebooks.org/about/standard-ebooks-and-the-pub... as well.
Great project! I hope some of these points are helpful to you in your endeavors.
With the copyright, I was more talking about the logo, but I can see why I didn't make that clear.
But in general, I absolutely do not care when people share the books.
So point taken - I'll rethink it and re-word it in the next couple of days. Thank you :)
a one-woman operation that has been running for over eight years. I format every single ebook myself, as well as maintaining the website. This is a passion project that was born from a love for reading and a commitment to make free ebooks that look good and feel enjoyable to read.
I use sources such as Project Gutenberg, Archive.org, and sometimes my own book collections. These texts serve as a foundation, and then public domain artwork is added to create a cover. Next comes editing and formatting for digital devices - either PDF, epub, or Kindle format. And voila, the process is complete.
They don't even have ads!
I really do love doing it. Also, I just updated the about page and index page that had 8 years - it's actually been closer to 10 now :)
Another great source of well formatted, public domain books.
A great source of free (public domain) audiobooks, mostly read very well.
I processed two books from Gutenberg for SE (Devil's Dictionary and a smaller scifi novel) and both were quite a bit of work to bang the books into shape (half the work was metadata enhancement, half was proofreading and correcting)
EDIT: After comparing, it's definitely just the raw Gutenburg scan w/formatting. You can see a big batch of fixed typos that weren't applied here: https://github.com/standardebooks/ambrose-bierce_the-devils-...
The books are mostly pre-electrical age - mid-1800s to early 1900s.
Check out the survivor-library here:
https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmcigXPHKoWg1g1J4zK5cvexQ5tEBS9VDUpyuhS...
This knowledge may be useful if we were to rebuild for example an airship (just naming one of your categories for example).
The ebooks I put out have definitely improved since I began the site though.
My abilities only run as far as HTML and CSS - although I did just start learning programming recently (so I have a fallback career in my fast approaching old age!)
And something I want to read but haven't found a copy: Secret Book of Secrets by Ibn Khalaf Al-Muradi
When I looked at the science of engineering and saw that it had disappeared after it's ancient heritage, that it's masters had perished, and that their memories are now forgotten, I worked my wits and thoughts in secrecy about philosophical shapes and figures, which could move the mind, with effort, from nothingness to being and from idleness to motion. And I arranged these shapes one by one in drawings and explained them. ~AD 1000For example: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q768792
Regardless, the OP is doing some great editorial and curation work, and this is something that many other ebook resources don't have. It's great stuff.
[0]: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33283 [1]: https://www.calculusmadeeasy.org/
Yeah I know what you mean! Eight edition is the same as seventh, but with random permutation of problem sets, just enough so you can't use for class assignment. I once had a teacher who would give us the inverse permutation to make it easy for students to use the older edition, but he was the exception...
Why do you want to learn calculus? If it's for review/fun, I'd like to recomment the MECH+CALC book that I wrote. It's not free, but very cheap. See preview here https://minireference.com/static/excerpts/noBSmathphys_v5_pr... Currently v5.4. I've been treating the problem sets as an append-only list so numbers are "backward compatible" with older versions.
https://archive.org/details/HogbenMathematicsForTheMillion/p...
Modern books use, in some areas and cases, more modern notation and approaches. That's helpful because math is not just knowledge but a language for communicating that knowledge.
If money is an issue[1], either of those Gutenberg texts (re-done with LaTeX), or the OpenStax calculus book are perfectly adequate. There's also no reason you couldn't use an AP Calculus review guide, or Schaum's Outlines, which aren't free but are in the <$25 range. Combined with resources like Youtube math channels, Wikipedia, Mathworld, and Sage and Mathematica (version 12 is freely available for the Raspberry Pi, though it'll be limited by hardware performance), anyone could learn calculus from the most dull and stilted and antiquated-notation calculus books ever written.
Math presented in a slightly obtuse way that doesn't lend itself to instant understanding might actually be better, as it forces the reader to think about the concept more, increasing retention.
Nobody needs Spivak's Calculus. I think it's a bit like the subtle meaning of Frost's Road Less Traveled. Everyone self-rationalizes about how their favorite math book is obviously the best, but in reality most of them probably learned the core of that subject from a different, less elegant book. It's not that it doesn't matter at all; better presentations might avoid an occasional unnecessary struggle over a concept, or lead to faster intuition of a visualization here and there, but it ultimately doesn't matter very much.
However, if you can buy a book (or pirate it) and want a modern digital alternative less like OpenStax or Stewart's, and more like Spivak (which sadly is only available in scans), Velleman's Calculus isn't bad, and you can supplement that with a modern analysis book like Tao, Pugh, or Abbott.
[1] Unless you are flat broke—in which case there's no reason even the most IP-respecting person should feel guilty about raiding libgen for learning material—the cost of a textbook approaches irrelevance when you'll spend 50, 100, or even more hours working through it. The opportunity cost of that time at minimum wage is many times the price of the textbook. What are you trying to accomplish by finding something free? Nobody needs to buy expensive textbooks anymore, but if you're opposed to paying money for textbooks on principle, you might ask yourself why.
Suggestion: It would be really great to have PDFs formatted for smaller paper sizes. With these PDFs, the font is going to get really small when reading on a remarkable or similar tablets and ebook readers. (Though one can always download the EPUBs and format them into PDF with optimized screen sizes using Calibre).
Regarding the PDFs - I will look into that. I think I always assumed if someone was reading on a smaller screen, an epub would suffice, but I shall see what I can do with the PDFs.
I have also kind of "standardized" on PDF for the way I manage my own collection, because you can always make EPUBs into PDFs, but not the other way around.
If it helps to understand why someone would stick to PDFs: I want to both preserve my ebooks over the long term (decades) and annotate them - comments, highlighting, etc. ePub's format is less stable for the long term, but most of all it lacks standardized annotation (afaict, after some detailed research). Also, if I annotate a book on my computer, I want the same copy on my small screen.
I hope that's helpful!
It's an open forum, there's a bunch of different contributors, with a lot of German contributions.
Sorted by downloads, viewable as collections and by series. It's a great experience for someone new to the classics.
Nice work
on edit: 15 out of a larger amount downloading I mean
For what it's worth, the emails I send are never automated, and I literally send a thank you email, but no more (unless people reply back to me that is)