Being locked down at home doesn’t mean that the pursuit of knowledge and continuous learning must stop. Without letting the opportunity to pick up a book and get back to reading pass, authors and libraries have unlocked some of their works and ebook collections for free online—here are some you can check out now.
Neil Gaiman
The “Stardust” and “American Gods” author has made some of his works available online for free on his website. This includes some of his short stories like “The Case of the Four and Twenty Blackbirds,” “I Cthulhu” and “A Study of Emerald” as well as essays like “The Bride of Frankenstein” and “How Dare You.”
Aside from these, he also has free excerpts of his best known works like the previously mentioned “Stardust” and “American Gods,” as well as “bonus” pages for the latter.
Paulo Coelho
As his way of helping out during the COVID-19 outbreak, the author behind “The Alchemist” recently announced that he is making some of his books available for download free of charge on his website for everyone required to stay at home due to quarantine and lockdown measures all around the world.
Three of these titles are full English versions of “Manual of the Warrior of Light,” “Manuscript Found in Accra” and “The Way of the Bow.”
[READ: For young readers, here’s an online library of Filipino children’s books you can access for free]
National Emergency Library
In this temporary lockdown period, the National Emergency Library poses as a haven for those always yearning to learn new things. It was introduced specifically to serve as “a collection of books that supports emergency remote teaching, research activities, independent scholarship, and intellectual stimulation while universities, schools, training centers, and libraries are closed.”
Promoting the right to knowledge by making books and research more accessible, the Internet Archive-run library has suspended waitlists for the 1.4 million books in their lending library for the meantime.
Project Gutenberg
If you love the classics, Project Gutenberg’s ebook collection of over 60,000 free ebooks is for you. Serving as an archive of the world’s great literature, the online library houses older works whose copyrights have already expired. Among the top read books on the website are Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Hyde,” Plato’s “Ion,” Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women” and Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.”
Header photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash
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