Collections of Free Electronic Knowledge--Online Classes, Ebooks, and Audiobooks

In this blog, I deal with free money, but also free stuff.  Many people know about free books you can get if you have Kindle or a device that takes Kindle apps., but you aren't chained to Kindle and Amazon if you want freebies.  Other sites have free material for downloading as well.

One I just found is Open Culture, a website that has compendiums of free ebooks, downloadable movies, online courses, certificate courses, MOOGs, language lessons, and more.  Another website devoted exclusively to free ebooks and audiobooks in the public domain (and in a couple of dozen different languages) is Books Should be Free.  You can also browse by genre (like Westerns, short stories, etc.). 
Librofile has both free and fee ebooks and audiobooks, hence has current titles. 

The Hathitrust Digital Library is a collection of digitalized books from the collections of research and university libraries around the world, but there's a catch.  The general public only has full access to works that are determined to be in the public domain.  Books that are still under copyright--or whose copyright status can't be determined--can be searched, but not accessed fully or downloaded.  That's a privilege that only students or faculty of those institutions can do.  However, the collections can be searched to identify which books may have information that you want, after which you may see about getting the material through an interlibrary loan.

Free Books for Preschool Children

Country music singer/songwriter Dolly Parton started Imagination Library in the 1995 to provide a free book a month to children from birth to 5 years old in eastern Tennessee.  The books are to nurture the love of books--and literacy--in households where children might otherwise not have access to reading material. Each month, a child who has been registered for the program by their parent or legal guardian is mailed an age-appropriate book to keep.

Since then it has spread through over 1,000 affiliates through the U.S., Great Britain, Australia and Canada.  If you are the parent or guardian of a child under 5, see if your area has an Imagination Library affiliate and if they are open for new registrations.  In the United States, this is the page to input your zip code and see if there is a program that covers your area.  There is also material available for the blind at no cost for eligible families, and reduced cost for others.

Free Books for Prison Inmates

“Ten guards and the warden couldn’t have torn me out of those books … I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me. I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life”.  -- Malcolm X

While families send packages to prisoners with food and sundries, organizations exist to send free books to prisoners.  In these days of public spending cutbacks, they offer individual prisoners the chance to get reading materials and some useful recreation for the mind.   If your loved one is in prison, here are some programs that can help them get free reading material.  While they have websites, most have to be contacted and your order put through the mail, rather than by phone or the internet.

The Prison Book Program has been in business for over 40 years, with all sorts of books sent around the country, although they make a special mission to send dictionaries and legal material.  There are several states (California, Texas, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Nevada or Texas), they do not serve.  See their contact page for more information.

BTW, the Inside Book Project is an Austin-based outfit especially for Texas prisoners.

Prisoners Literature Project also provides books to prisoners.  They can't send heavy books, and only take requests by mail, but if you have some topics that you like your best bet is to send it as a general subject request. 

Books Through Bars serves prisoners in some of the northeast states (Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia).

Books Through Bars also has a listing of other free prisoner book programs.  If none of these other programs are a help, check out this list.