Need some new reading material? Public domain books and ebooks – books that are absolutely free to download and are no longer under copyright – are a great way to find fantastic books, from classics to romance to computer manuals. Here are 16 sources for free books or ebooks in the public domain you can quickly and easily download to your PC to read right in your Web browser. Most of these sites also make their content offerings available to download for a wide variety of e-readers (such as a Kindle or a Nook) as well.
Authorama offers a wide variety of books from a great selection of authors, anyone from Hans Christian Anderson to Mary Shelley. If you're looking for the classics this is a good place to start. More »
Audio books are a great way to get your reading in especially if you're in your car a lot, and Librivox looks to fill that need with hundreds of freely available audio books. Volunteers sign up to read chapters of public domain books, then those chapters are placed online for readers to download (for free!).Pro tip: be sure to look for the Librivox app to add to your mobile device so you can listen to all of your favorites on the go. More »
Project Gutenberg is one of the oldest sources for public domain books on the Web. Over 32,000 books available at the time of this writing, in many different formats (PC, Kindle, Sony reader, etc.). One of the widest selections you'll find of freely available books on the Web. More »
Feedbooks offers free public domain books, as well as original works from authors uploading their books to the site - great way to discover new reading from authors who aren't necessarily in the spotlight as yet. In addition, if you've been itching to publish a book, Feedbooks is a good source to get the word out as well. More »
The Internet Archive is an amazing resource for public domain books, with sub-collections such as American Libraries, Children's Library, and the Biodiversity Heritage Library. More collections are added on a regular basis, so be sure to check back often for new reading material. More »
ManyBooks offers more than 28,000 free public domain books for download. The site is organized so you can books as easily as possible: by Authors, by Titles, by Genres, by New Titles. This is one of the most user-friendly sites on the Web for finding and downloading free books. More »
Similar to Librivox, LoudLit partners up great literature found in the public domain with high quality audio recordings, both available for download right to your PC or e-reader. More »
The Online Library of Liberty offers readers "individual liberty, limited constitutional government, and the free market", all in the public domain and free for download.More »
Questia offers books, journal articles, magazines, and newspaper articles, all in the humanities and social sciences. Questia is especially useful for anyone needing scholarly resources, since all the materials are reviewed by collection librarians. More »
Books, essays, poems, stories.....all available at ReadPrint, along with 8000 other books by 3500 authors. More »
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World Public Library - The Sound of Literary Works
While the World Public Library site, a database of over 400,000 works, is not free, you can access the Sound of Literary Works page gratis. Each of these classic literature and poetry performances are free to download.
From the Institute of Learning Technologies, part of Columbia University, a collection of classic thinkers such as Dante, Plato's The Republic, Virgil's Aeneid, etc. More »
A number of technical books are available from the O'Reilly Open Books Project, mostly focusing on programming languages and computer operating systems. More »
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How to Find Public Domain Books Using Google
There are a number of different searches you can plug in to Google to find public domain books. Use the following simply as suggestions. You can append whatever subject you're looking for either in front or following the phrase in quotes, i.e., boating laws "public domain". Quotes should be used around these phrases in order to bring back accurate results (see Looking for a Specific Phrase? Use Quotation Marks).
"public domain"
"this document is in the public domain"
"this text is in the public domain"
"this information is in the public domain"
"this page is in the public domain"
site:.edu "not copyrighted"
site:.edu "public domain"
site:.gov "not copyrighted"
site:.gov "public domain"
site:.org "not copyrighted"
site:.org "public domain"
You can also use Google Scholar to find public domain works. Go to the Advanced Scholar Search, and in the Date/Return articles published between field, type in 1923 in the second date box. This will return public domain works (again, be sure to double check each piece of content to make sure that it does indeed fall under public domain).
US President Donald Trump participates in NORAD Santa Tracker phone calls with children at Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida on December 24 [Reuters/Carlos Barria]
The world has endured one complete and completely calamitous year of Donald Trump, the president of the United States - "Mr President", as Americans reverentially refer to him.
After a tumultuous and deeply divisive presidential campaign, in a free and fair general election, Americans elected a notoriously racist, consistently misogynistic, white supremacist, xenophobic, real estate charlatan as their president, entrusting him with their highest and most revered political office. He was solemnly sworn in "to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States" on January 20, 2017, at 9am.
To be fair, in electing Donald Trump as their president Americans did not have much of a choice, for opposing him in the final election was a singularly corrupt corporate lackey and carpetbagger named Hillary Clinton who systematically sabotaged the campaign of the only decent American that could have been elected president - Senator Bernie Sanders.
Given their choice between Hillary Clinton and a nefarious charlatan, Americans opted for the nefarious charlatan. There are certain snakes in hell from which you run to dragons, as we say in Persian.
The world thus nosedived into perhaps the most dangerously destructive year in its recent history. We are now living that history. We are about to finish its first year: year 1 AT (after Trump).
We, the future historians of our present
The future historians (if Trump leaves us a future to fathom and does not cause a nuclear holocaust or an environmental calamity does not put an end to us all) ought to know that this US president wakes up early in the morning and the first thing he does is start bombarding the globe with the most inane, most imbecilic salvos of gibberish that emerge from his mental and moral indigestion.
He calls them his "tweets". What a beautiful word to abuse and waste for his blithering verbal diarrhoea - no harmless birdie ever chirped anything but joy in this world. Then he goes about issuing his racist misanthropic fatwas against one thing or another.
One day, he bans Muslims from entering the US; another day, he pulls the US out of environmental accords meant to preserve the earth; the next day, he wants to build a wall at the Mexican border because he thinks Mexicans are rapists; and the day after, he steals a whole historic city and gives it to his Zionist financiers, before, just for fun, saying Haitians "all have AIDS".
If he doesn't have anything else to do, he just tweets - a few Islamophobic videos, defends some neo-Nazi thugs, and makes a few anti-Semitic remarks. His supporters just love him for these spontaneous outbursts of his true nature. "He tells it like it is," they say.
Trump consistently lies, systematically cheats, unabashedly insults weak and vulnerable people. He keeps up with his predecessors' habit of mass-selling arms to Arab tyrants to kill more Muslims, gives them for free to Israelis to keep killing more Palestinians and stealing their lands, and he then awards them by declaring Jerusalem their capital.
The world is scared witless of climate change. He says global warming is good to combat cold weather.
The world is aghast at the range of sexual assaults and sexual harassment perpetrated by powerful men and here he is the president of the United States, the most dangerously powerful man on planet earth, facing allegations of predatory sexual misconduct.
We the future historians of our present must rush to anachronism to tell our posterity (if there will be a posterity) what has happened to us.
A neo-globalist
The world looks at the United States today and shivers with outrage, with fear and trembling, aghast at the moral and political bankruptcy of a "democratic system" that results in such disgraceful insults to common human decency. This is in sharp contradistinction to what any decent American thinks of himself or herself. Trump's election has brought the majority of Americans to the bosom of humanity at large - fearing for themselves their own elected imperial officers.
There are those among Americans who think Trump is a political isolationist or an economic nationalist. But that is not the case. Politically, he is a warmongering bully that has intensified bombing of nations and then sought to close the US borders to its catastrophic humanitarian consequences. That is not isolationism. That is amoral cowardice.
The same goes for his economic policies. He wishes to rob the world of its natural resources, destroy the environment, and enrich his obscenely rich political backers. That is not economic nationalism. That is highway robbery on a global scale.
The first target of Trump's nefarious economics has been American people themselves. His monumental tax scheme that his fellow Republicans just passed will target the poorest segments of the US society to enrich the tiny upper echelon of the country. What sort of "nationalism" is that? He is a thief stealing from the poor enriching the rich even more.
What Donald Trump has staged is first and foremost the moral and political crisis that "Western democracy", in general, and American democracy, in particular, face today. All the way from Plato and Aristotle to Thomas Jefferson and Alexis de Tocqueville, the world has been force-fed, lectured at and politically held hostage to overdoses of highfalutin treatises about "Western liberal democracy" - the crowning achievement of which is this clinically diabolical buffoon.
Trump is no isolationist or nationalist. He is a neo-globalist of fear and fanaticism, of thievery for the rich and destitution for the rest.
The law of diminishing returns
A year into the Trump presidency, the global perception of common American decency has been seriously diminished, the fear of its vulgar and violent militarism increased, the brutish impact of US disregard for planetary environmental calamity intensified, nefarious US allies like Saudi Arabia and Israel given free hands to slaughter people in Yemen and Palestine with impunity, the poorest and most vulnerable segments of American society targeted for even more impoverishment, its richest pockets made even deeper and more obscenely rich.
The world, including the majority of Americans, stand today on one side, and Donald Trump and his richest and most dangerous beneficiaries from Washington to Tel Aviv to Riyadh on the other. They are wreaking havoc across the globe and we are bracing for even worse to come.
A shining truth emerges from this calamitous condition of humanity at year 1 AT of our world history. The world is forever freed from all its dangerous delusions: from the nativist American democracy to European liberal globalism, from the corrupt Russian oligarchy to the globalised Chinese communism, from xenophobic Zionism to megalomaniac Islamism, from homicidal Hindu fundamentalism to genocidal Buddhist nationalism.
Free at last, as the moral voice of Martin Luther King Jr, declared, thank God Almighty we are free at last from all the false god terms of our history - just a year into the presidency of our very own Roman Emperor Mr Donald Trump, Real Estate Developer, Inc. We are freed from all delusional fantasies East and West and walk through this valley of despair with our eyes and hearts wide open, our minds and intellect clear and caring - the modest prophets of our own uncharted destinies.
User calls telephone operator to dictate message, which is then sent by post to recipient
The last clarion call of the Titanic, an announcement of the first successful flight and America's entry into World War One - on more than one occasion the telegram has been at the heart of history.
Now it is coming to a final end, in Belgium - one of the last countries to use the messaging service.
The final message will be delivered on December 29, 171 years after the country's first electric telegram was sent down a line laid alongside the railway linking Brussels and Antwerp.
"If you ask young people [about it], they don't know what a telegram is," says Jack Hamande, an executive board member at the Belgian Institute for Postal Services and Telecommunications (BIPT).
"People like to have an instant response, which is not the case with a telegram."
The decline of the telegram has been swift in a world saturated by telephone networks, the internet and instant messaging services such as Whatsapp, Viber, Facebook Messenger and even Telegram - an app named after its predecessor which launched in 2013.
As recently as the 1980s, more than 1.5 million telegrams were sent and received per year in Belgium.
But fewer than 9,000 were dispatched in the first 11 months of this year, marking a 20 percent decline from 2016.
If you ask young people [about it], they don't know what a telegram is.
JACK HAMANDE, EXECUTIVE BOARD MEMBER, BELGIAN INSTITUTE FOR POSTAL SERVICES AND TELECOMMUNICATIONS (BIPT)
And with fees rising to 16 euro ($19) for a 20-word message, the telegram has not been able to compete with today's technology.
No longer a necessity
Proximus, a telecommunications company, managed the telegram service in Belgium, where the government has ruled that the network no longer constitutes a public service.
The telegram has been kept alive by the custom of a handful of business clients.
"It is mainly 10 customers using the telegram in Belgium today … in finance, judicial services and insurance," says Hamande.
"Most of the current users of telegram will shift to registered mail … we see no reason to force the company to maintain this service."
The 'Zimmermann Telegram' revealed Germany had offered Mexico territory in the US, prompting US President Woodrow Wilson to engage the US in World War One [Jennifer McDermott/AP Photo]
Whereas a perceived lack of speed stalled the telegram's popularity in personal communications, developments in digital security have hastened the technology's end in the business world.
The emergence of digitally registered mail, in particular, has meant the telegram no longer occupies a niche in terms of its legal validity in Belgium and elsewhere.
According to David Hay, head of heritage and archives at BT (formerly British Telecom), telegrams were traditionally "used as evidence because they were date stamped automatically".
"Only in the past few years have things such as emails been accepted as legal evidence," he says.
Varied history, mixed messages
Britain, where the telegram was invented in the 1830s, switched off its network more than a decade ago. Other countries followed suit since, such as the United States in 2006, and India in 2013.
"After decades of good, loyal service, it is time for the telegram to give way to new means of communication," Proximus - Belgium's largest mobile telecommunications company - announced on its website on December 12.
But in its heyday, the telegram spread across the world, shaping the way governments, businesses and people interacted.
In 1985, 60 million telegrams were being sent and received a year in India from 45,000 offices [File: Danish Siddiqui/Reuters]
"It was a global technology, in the 19th century and for the first part of the 20th century, it was the major telecommunications technology," says BT's Hay.
"It was wholly revolutionary, it reduced the time it took to send messages from one end of the world to the other from months to hours and later minutes."
The technology transformed events from weddings to wars.
It had a much bigger impact on the world in terms of trade, governance and indeed society at the time than the internet has today.
DAVID HAY, HEAD OF HERITAGE AND ARCHIVES, BT
"Telegrams [were sent] to families of people who were missing or killed," says Hay.
"If you saw a messenger coming up the garden path then invariably it was going to be bad news during wartime."
It was also used for moments of celebration.
In Britain, people sent congratulatory notes to couples getting married and new parents.
"They [operators] introduced greetings telegrams, which were much more colourful, rather than the drab brown form that was used for standard telegrams," says Hay.
"They were delivered in gold envelopes so that people would recognise they weren't bad news."
Today, in Belgium and elsewhere, the telegram is a relic.
"It had a much bigger impact on the world in terms of trade, governance and indeed society at the time than the internet has today," says Hay.
"The Victorians were astonished by the technology … They called it the electric fluid, and the wonder of the age."
The reporters had been working on stories about a military crackdown on the Rohingya Muslim minority in Rahkine State. Photograph: EPA
Myanmar’s government said on Wednesday that police had arrested two Reuters journalists, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo. The reporters had been working on stories about a military crackdown on the Rohingya Muslim minority in Rahkine State that has caused almost 650,000 people to flee to neighboring Bangladesh.
The ministry of information said in a statement on its Facebook page that the journalists and two policemen face charges under the British colonial-era Official Secrets Act. The 1923 law carries a maximum prison sentence of 14 years.
The reporters “illegally acquired information with the intention to share it with foreign media,” said the statement, which was accompanied by a photo of the pair in handcuffs.
It said they were detained at a police station on the outskirts of Yangon, the southeast Asian nation’s main city.
Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo went missing on Tuesday evening after they had been invited to meet police officials over dinner.
Reuters’ driver Myothant Tun dropped them off at Battalion 8’s compound at around 8pm and the two reporters and two police officers headed to a nearby restaurant. The journalists did not return to the car.
Blatant attack
The Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh say their exodus from the mainly Buddhist nation was triggered by a military counter-offensive in Rakhine state that the United Nations has branded “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing”.
“Reuters reporters Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo have been reporting on events of global importance in Myanmar, and we learned today that they have been arrested in connection with their work,” said Stephen J. Adler, president and editor-in-chief of Reuters.
“We are outraged by this blatant attack on press freedom. We call for authorities to release them immediately,” he said.
A spokesman for Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi confirmed that the two journalists had been arrested.
“Not only your reporters, but also the policemen who were involved in that case,” spokesman Zaw Htay said. “We will take action against those policemen and also the reporters.”
In Washington, State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert emphasized that the agency was “following this closely”. She said that US ambassador Scot Marciel on Wednesday had a conversation with two government officials in Myanmar who seemed genuinely unaware of the situation.
“We care about the safety and security of international reporters who are simply just trying to do their jobs. So we’re going to continue to try to stay on that,” Nauert said.
The US embassy in Yangon said in a statement posted on its website on Wednesday it was “deeply concerned by the highly irregular arrests of two Reuters reporters after they were invited to meet with police officials in Yangon last night”.
“For a democracy to succeed, journalists need to be able to do their jobs freely,” the embassy said. “We urge the government to explain these arrests and allow immediate access to the journalists.”
The European Union’s mission in Yangon also voiced concern.
“The EU delegation is closely following their case and we call on the Myanmar authorities to ensure the full protection of their rights,” it said in a statement. “Media freedom is the foundation of any democracy.”
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists called for the reporters’ immediate and unconditional release.
“These arrests come amid a widening crackdown which is having a grave impact on the ability of journalists to cover a story of vital global importance,” said Shawn Crispin, CPJ’s senior Southeast Asia representative.
Texted four words
Wa Lone, who joined Reuters in July 2016, has covered a range of stories, including the flight of Rohingya refugees from Rakhine in 2016 and, in much larger numbers, this year.
He has written about military land grabs and the killing of ruling party lawyer Ko Ni in January. This year he jointly won an honorable mention from the Society of Publishers in Asia for Reuters coverage of the Rakhine crisis in 2016.
He previously worked for the Myanmar Times, where he covered Myanmar’s historic 2015 elections, and People’s Age, a local weekly newspaper, where his editor was Myanmar’s current Minister of Information Pe Myint.
Kyaw Soe Oo, an ethnic Rakhine Buddhist from state capital Sittwe, has worked with Reuters since September.
He has covered the impact of the August 25th attacks on police and army posts in the northern Rakhine, and reported from the central part of the state where local Buddhists have been enforcing segregation between Rohingya and Rakhine communities.
He previously worked for Root Investigation Agency, a local news outlet focused on Rakhine issues.
“I have been arrest” were the four words that Wa Lone texted to Reuters Myanmar Bureau Chief Antoni Slodkowski on Tuesday evening to let him know what was happening. Very soon after that Wa Lone’s phone appeared to have been switched off.
Over the next 24 hours, Reuters colleagues in Yangon filed a missing persons report, went to three police stations, and asked a series of government officials what had happened to the two reporters. They got no official information until Wednesday evening.
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![US President Donald Trump participates in NORAD Santa Tracker phone calls with children at Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida on December 24 [Reuters/Carlos Barria]](https://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdxxlarge/mritems/Images/2017/12/30/51eb1961e44a4ce491bd92b9a0045af3_18.jpg "History of the world at year 1 after Trump")
