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Open access books & journals online: Digital Books Online

How to locate digital versions of older books

Collections of Books

Here are some reliable sites that make available older books that have been scanned and some descriptions to help compare them.  There could be more than one copy of a title within a site (as well as across sites), so sift through results and virtually flip through some pages! 

  • HathiTrust Digital Library - Seeks to digitally preserve and make available public domain material from various other sites
  • Internet Archive - San-Francisco based nonprofit digital library (Also see Archive-It from the same organization; contains digital special collections of cultural heritage.)
  • British Library historical texts - Almost half a million titles from the 15th through 19th centuries.
  • Early English Books Online - An open access project containing many Puritan works.
  • Eighteenth Century Collections Online - Many (not all) titles here are religions/theological in nature.
  • Google Books - Well known to be a comprehensive index of full-text books through the Google Book ProjectMonergism - Hundreds of free Puritan and Reformed e-books.
  • Project Gutenberg - Thousands of freely available ebooks, for download or to read online
  • DOAB - Directory of Open Access Books provides a portal for academic publishers to make available peer-reviewed books that have been published in open access.
  • FirstLove Publications - FirstLove Mission provides Biblically sound books, booklets, tracts on doctrinal, evangelistic, apologetic, and devotional subjects.
  • Third Mill - This page will lead you to a variety of electronic resources, including e-books, available through Third Millennium Ministries.
  • Frame-Poythress.org - This site contains pieces (many excerpted from published books) written by two well known Reformed theologians and authors, John Frame and Vern Poythress.

Books in Series

Below are titles in particular series from various sources.