Project Gutenberg has been putting books online since 1971, long before the web existed. The collection now holds nearly 80,000 titles, all of them free to download and read without registration. The focus is on older works whose U.S. copyright has expired, which means you will find Dickens, Austen, Twain, Shakespeare, and thousands of other authors in plain text, EPUB, and Kindle formats. Volunteers digitize and proofread each book, so the quality is consistently high.

There is no app to install and no account to create. You browse by author, title, subject, or reading list, download what you want, and read it on any device. The site also links to LibriVox for human-read audiobooks of many titles. For anyone who reads classics or needs public-domain texts for research, it remains one of the most reliable free libraries on the internet.