Those of us who teach at home are always pleased when we can find resources that help keep the costs down. Books are probably the first item you think about when asked to name the tools used for teaching, and their cost represents a major part of the budget if you are buying books new from a store. Because most of us don’t have unlimited funds, a reliable and inexpensive source for good quality reading materials is a godsend.

Over the next few days I’d like to tell you about three of my favourite sites for free books. There are others, and I promise I will discuss them in other posts. For now I want to discuss my “big 3″: Project Gutenberg, the Baldwin Project and Librivox.

The texts you will find at all three locations are public domain resources in a variety of formats. These are not pirated copies! Mostly, they are books written prior to 1923, whose copyright protections have expired in the United States, and in many other jurisdictions. They are both free of charge and legal for people in those places to view, print, copy and share. In fact, you can generally even re-format the files you save to your computer and distribute the resulting product. Check each text you save, to see what uses are permitted.

If you have any doubts about the need for free texts let me share this: As of 2005 UNESCO figures showed that 774,218,139 adults and 35,769,284 youth between 15-24 were illiterate worldwide. Of these, a significant number were women and girls. Think that’s “just” a third world problem? In the same table UNESCO states that 16,459,138 adults (and 2,564,757 youth) in North America are illiterate. That’s over 19,000,000 of your neighbours who cannot order from a restaurant menu, read a newspaper or their child’s report card, or follow the safety instructions on a bottle of prescription medicine without assistance. Nineteen million people in North America alone. More than the combined populations of the mega-cities of Montreal, Toronto and New York.

While access to free texts will not by itself solve the problem of illiteracy, it’s sure tough to raise literate children without quality literature. There are some good places to buy books (perhaps the subject of another post) but even those merchants can’t give books away. Then if you live in Canada you have to pay GST on new books - don’t even get me started on the government taxing literacy!

If you are fortunate enough to be able to read this and you have some spare time, please consider helping out one of the sites I am reviewing - or join a local group that teaches reading skills and promotes lifelong learning. If you can’t help now please enjoy the books with your kids, and raise some readers
Read on to learn about Project Gutenberg. Reviews of the Baldwin Project and Librivox are coming soon.

This work was created by Ruby of Freehold 2, and is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License.

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