Books For All · free forever

Start reading now

A shelf you can open in the next ten seconds. No account, no email, no card. Read them, download them, or print them.

Readers with books provided by Nydus Foundation

What you can read now

The shelf

A shelf we picked out, shortest first — so you can finish one tonight. Each is free to read in your browser, free to download, and free to print. Every title is in the public domain and stays that way.

Yours to keep

Free means free

No account, no catch, no small print. These books are old enough that they belong to everyone now, or they come with an open licence that welcomes exactly this — so reading them, saving them, and sharing them is simply what they are for.

Read one tonight, download the lot, print a stack for a classroom, hand a copy to a friend. It is all yours to do, and always free.

Curious about a particular title? Each one lists its licence on its own page on Codal.(opens in a new tab)

The rest of it

This is a shelf, not the whole library

The full catalogue is far larger — mathematics, physics, philosophy, literature, history — and it lives on Codal, where we maintain it in the open. The books above are the ones we hand out first.

Codal has its own search across every title. It is a working archive of historical texts, not a curated reading list — it is unrated, much of it is adult, and some of it is ugly on purpose because the record is kept whole. Look before you point a class at it.

Search every title on Codal(opens in a new tab)

Formats & downloads

Yes — take them with you

Every book is free to download, with no account and no email address. Open a book above and the download options are on its page. The files are yours: keep them, copy them, hand them to someone else, put them on a school server.

Every book, every wayfree · no account
  • Read in the browsernothing to install
  • PDFevery title
  • EPUBphones & e-readers
  • Print bookletimposed to fold

Not every title has every format yet — open a book and its page lists what it has. The print booklet is the one the program is built around: it is a PDF laid out so a local press, or you, can print and fold it into a real book.

Print one yourself

Any copy shop can make you a book

A file on your phone, a trip to a print shop, and the price of the paper — that is a real book on your desk, black and white and bound. Nothing here needs anybody’s permission to print: it is public domain, or it carries a licence that says so outright.

We wrote the whole thing down: what to download, where to take it, the four things to ask for at the counter, and how to work out what it will cost before you go.

How to print your own book

Get involved

Free to read. Not free to make.

Maintaining these editions, translating them, and printing them locally is what donations to Books For All pay for. The reading stays free either way.

DonateVolunteer with us(opens in a new tab)