These are Web sites offering electronic versions of books for free. The majority of the books are older ones due to their copyrights expiring.

Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts
This is a large collection of American and English works of literature and philosophy. Examples include works by Charles Dickens, Martin Luther King Jr., Plato, William Shakespeare, Adam Smith, Bram Stoker, Mark Twain, Voltaire, and many more. Books are available as txt or pdf.

Bartleby.com
This is another huge collection of resources. Includes works of fiction, non-fiction, reference, and poetry. Examples include the Columbia Encyclopedia, Bartlett's Quotations, Roget's Thesaurus, works by Jane Austen, Victor Hugo, Homer, Carl Sandburg, Emily Dickinson, Albert Einstein, and on and on! Book format is html.

Blackmask
Contains full-text of over 13,000 books! Works on biography, fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, many in multiple file formats such as html, pdf, Rocket e-book, and more.

Children's Books Online: The Rosetta Project
Provides hundreds of children's books from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Books may be read online or downloaded, and consist of scanned images of pictures and text. Includes books in other languages.

Escholarship
The eScholarship Editions collection includes more than 1,400 books from academic presses on a range of topics, including art, science, history, music, religion, and fiction.  Access to the electronic books is open to all University of California faculty, staff, and students, while select books are available to the public.

Etext Center of the University of Virginia Library
1,800 publicly-available ebooks from the University of Virginia Library's Etext Center, including classic British and American fiction, major authors, children's literature, American history, Shakespeare, African-American documents, the Bible, and much more.

International Children's Digital Library
Location for many children's books from around the world and in various languages. Books consist of scanned images of the original. Great subject browsing.

Online Books Page, University of Pennsylvania
Archives over 20,000 books and includes special features such as Banned Books, Prize Winners, and Women Writers.

Project Gutenberg
The grandaddy of archived books! Fiction, non-fiction, reference works, musical scores, and much more. All books are in txt format, some in .zip for easy download.