The Online Books Page

WHAT GOES IN THE ONLINE BOOKS INDEXES

On The Online Books Page, I list free books, definitive collections, and serials. Some people have asked me what goes in the index of individual titles, and what doesn't. Here's a brief summary of my criteria for listing books. (See also a similar set of criteria for serials.)

• Is it legitimately available at no charge?

  A book is considered legitimately available if any one of these conditions holds:

  • It is not copyrighted in the country from which the online book is served. To qualify under this condition, the country must be a signatory of the Berne Convention, or the book must be out of copyright under the minimal standards of that convention. (I don't intend this condition to include loopholes involving countries that have no effective copyright law.) If the book is copyrighted in the US (where this site is located) but not in the Berne member country from where it's served, I'll list it, but include a warning page.
  • The appropriate copyright holder has granted permission for free personal, noncommercial online use. (The exact terms for any copyrighted work may vary. Terms that allow wider use than this are also acceptable and encouraged.)
  • In some special circumstances, some copyrighted works can also go online without permission under special licenses granted by law. (This last category, for instance, in the US may include certain out-of-print works in their last 20 years of copyright, as per the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.)
  For more information about copyrights and permissions, see this page. I won't knowingly list any copyrighted works that have been put online without obtaining a required permission. Please mail me if you find any titles I've mistakenly listed.

  I only index books that don't charge you to read them. Shareware fees are considered charges (they're simply enforced by the honor system). There's a list of companies that sell online books off my main page, if you're interested in books you have to pay for. At the moment, I'm also considering demands for access to one's personal information, emailboxes, or social media accounts to be "charges", if they're not actually necessary for getting or controlling access to the book, and there is no clear way to opt out of them.

  Online books that are only available through a paid subscription service do not qualify for listing, even if there is no further charge for the book once you've subscribed, and even if there is a limited free trial period. (So, for instance, Kindle Unlimited copies do not qualify for listing, since it costs money to be a Kindle Unlimited subscriber for more than a limited time, and there's a registration requirement for access.) Also, books that are only free for a limited time do not qualify for listing here, as we intend our listings to be persistent. (There are other sites that specialize in limited-time book deals.)

  You're welcome to invite people to buy the print version on your site as well; I just require that an electronic version be readable without charge.

• Is it the full text of a significant book, that uses a European alphabet?

  By "full text", I mean all the essential text of the book; if you read the online text, you'd feel as if you read the whole book. Introductions, appendices, and illustrations may be omitted in many cases. I won't index excerpts, or books that suddenly cut off in the middle with a note to send away for the final chapters.

  Generally a book is "significant" if it's listed as a book in the online catalog of a major library such as the Library of Congress. This is a fairly easy test for most print books to pass, and a number of libraries also acquire and catalog selected electronic-only books. I've also listed a few electronic-only titles not in libraries, but these generally don't get listed unless they're shown to be particularly noteworthy in some sort of (formal or informal) 'peer review'. For example, I list some textbooks, which often are slow to appear in library collections, if I can find evidence that they're used in classes at accredited institutions whose teachers have no relation with the authors or the authors' institutions. If you find an electronic-only title you consider worthy of inclusion, send me the URL and the reasons you think it should be listed.

  I will also list definitive collections (such as "all the works of a particular author we can put online") if they seem to be actively maintained and contain at least one significant print book.

  Finally, I also list significant runs of serials (magazines, newspapers, journals, etc.) under similar criteria to that described here for books. See this page for more information on what online serials I list.

  A number of shorter (less than book-sized) texts and unpublished electronic-only texts are listed in various archives and indexes that I link to.

  I limit my curated collection to works in English and other European-script languages only because I don't have the time and expertise to do other languages. (My own selections are almost entirely in English; I can catalog other languages, sometimes with some help, if I can read the alphabets.) However, the extended shelves may include books in other languages. I also point to a number of archives and indexes for other languages from the top-level page. Let me know if there are other such sites I should include.

  I will list significant books that are shorter than the 49 pages considered by some to be the lower limit of a "book", if they've been published on their own; however, very short texts (such as broadsides) will generally not be included even if some libraries catalog them as books. Some other types of works not usually listed here include

  • Theses, dissertations, and other student writings (unless they are widely carried beyond their sponsoring institution, or deal with an important subject not otherwise covered by our listings). See the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations for a large-scale index of free online dissertations.
  • Sheet music for individual songs. But we will consider books that include spoken or sung text and that are compilations of multiple songs, or of long-form compositions like operas and musical plays. We also list some other archives and indexes for sheet music here; try them if you're looking for music beyond what we list individually.

• Is it a stable, well-formatted text in a standard format?

  I try to link to the best sites for texts I can find. I will prefer fast, highly available sites over slow sites that are often down. I prefer sites that have straightforward URLs that don't change every few weeks. I prefer sites that have texts in portable, widely supported formats, such as HTML (this is the Web, after all), PDF (which now has a published specification and viewers from various sources) or plain vanilla text. Books in proprietary formats that do not have published specifications, and that can only be read on certain vendor's systems, generally aren't listed here unless they're not available in more open formats. (For example, Microsoft Reader or .lit format is a proprietary format as of this writing, so you won't see many MS Reader books listed unless they're only published online in that format, or Microsoft openly publishes its Reader format specification.) Books that are available only as executable files are generally not listed at all, for reasons of security as well as portability.

  If there are more accurate sources of a text, or sources that have more useful text features, I'll prefer those to less accurate ones. Online editions which state their provenance (such as what print edition they're based on) are often more reliable than those that do not. I will also generally prefer sites that have few or no ads over sites that have aggressive or confusing advertising.

  Note that I don't provide storage space for titles; just listings for them. If you have an online book you'd like to find a home for, I can help you find an archive that might be interested in carrying it.

I hope the index of titles is a useful service for the Net. If you find it useful, please let me know when you learn of new texts and sources that I haven't listed yet.

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Edited by John Mark Ockerbloom (onlinebooks@pobox.upenn.edu)
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