3 Million Texts for Free

Hundreds of libraries reached the milestone of offering 3 million freely downloadable texts yesterday through the Internet Archive website.  Our 3 millionth text is a Galileo pamphlet from the rare book collection of the University of Toronto.

Internet Archive has been scanning books since 2005.  We have made approximately 2 million books from 1,000 libraries in 200 languages available online since that time.   Another 1 million texts have been uploaded by others, including everything from original books to court records to scans from other digitization projects and 37,000 books from Project Gutenberg.

More than 100 people digitize books in Internet Archive scanning centers in 27 libraries in 6 countries.  At 10 cents a page, we are bringing over 1,000 new books online every day.

Archive.org is visited by more than 1 million different users every day.  Books are downloaded or read on archive.org about 10 million times each month, and approximately 2,000 books for the blind and dyslexic (print disabled) are downloaded every day.

Other projects use the texts archive in bulk.  Researches at the University of Massachusetts have used millions of archive.org books to do digital scholarship.  OpenLibrary.org integrates these books with many thousands of recent books for the print disabled and library borrowers.  All of the public domain books are full text searchable, indexed by multuiple search engines, and downloadable individually or in bulk.

Please help us build the library of free books by scanning and uploading, by donating physical books to the Internet Archive, or by sponsoring the digitization of great collections!

43 thoughts on “3 Million Texts for Free

  1. Gerard Arthus

    Great milestone. And the pace is accelerating. It is wonderful that there are so many different types of items. The Internet Archive is truley becoming a great repository.

    Gerry

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  3. The Glove Compartment Isn't Accurately Named

    Congratulations on reaching this milestone, and good luck for the future!

  4. Stian Håklev

    This is absolutely wonderful news, however, when I visit openlibrary.org is says 928,782 ebooks available for online reading. Where are the other two million books? On Archive.org? But it’s almost impossible to browse Archive.org in a meaningful way. I hope you make efforts to make these books available to the great interface at openlibrary.org!

    1. David Edwards

      Openlibrary.org is a subset of Archive.org.

      “Another 1 million texts have been uploaded by others, including everything from original books to court records to scans from other digitization projects and 37,000 books from Project Gutenberg.”

      Everything else is what Archive.org has scanned itself. It is the same search engine so I am not sure why you fine it harder to search Archive.org.

      Anyway, Congrats on the 3 million books.

      1. Charles Redman mailmandeliver@yahoo.com

        I agree, I find http://www.archive.org/ a great tool in tracking down my text, be it word search by title, Author Etc. I have a easy time there and can spend hours searching and reading…I would love to be a part of this, I only do not know how a Country boy can help. 🙂

        1. Lorri Cornett

          Help out with Project Gutenberg by helping to proof documents online. You can do it anytime, for any amount of time. Look into it if you are interested in being part of this world-wide community effort!

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  6. Dennis Higman

    I welcome the opportunity provided by such organisations to make public thousands of books from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteen centuries. As a student of history, it enables me to access many primary sources referred to in modern publications which would otherwise be difficult to access. However, I have found Google to be a frustrating organisation when it comes to digitising history books as they frequently fail to publish maps and tables that fold out and while such information may appear ‘dated’, as these are history books, I feel that they are integral to the work as published. I therefore seek to avoid Google e-books and seek others who take great pains to publish works in full. Other than that, I reiterate my applauding of the idea of making these books available to the masses.

  7. Jeroen Hellingman

    Good to hear about the contribution of Project Gutenberg. Although 37.000 books may sound like just a small fraction of 3 million, those books are not just scans, but careful proofread text versions (often accompanied by illustrated HTML, and downloadable in a range of different formats for all kinds of reading devices from the Project Gutenberg website.

    Many of those Project Gutenberg versions have actually been prepared from scans that have been posted in the Internet Archive in the first place, so this is really an enabling project!

  8. Denis

    Amazing speed of digitization. But the quaint fact that not all digitized books in English of the 19th century while some books have more than a dozen digital versions.
    The reason for the fall of interest in the books is that modern books just are not interesting. So the digitization of these jewels are highly useful for those times when people could start to think deeply and to read relevant books.
    Books from the British Museum come to the archive?
    I’m a foreigner and learning English by readers and books of fairy tales – the books of the 19th century, and the pleasure derived from reading enough on what to do this all day. And students are suffering is useless without finding interesting ideas in modern books. .

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    1. internetarchive

      Books can be sent to:
      Internet Archive
      300 Funston Avenue
      San Francisco, CA 94127

      Thank you.

  13. PBS

    Congratulations. Real Great Job.

    However, titles of some Telugu Books happen to be mis-spelt and require correction. I can do my bit by helping the Archive in correcting these titles.

  14. Jampa Namgyal

    I’ve been following you for years. I’m glad to see this new success of yours. As to me, I began recently to upload some of the works I think interesting end useful to share. In my blog about digital libraries (myfullresearch.wordpress.com) I frequently cite your site or items. Your text collections indeed satisfy every request.
    Thanks again!

  15. Chris K

    An amazing achievement..only wish it had happened 20 years ago !

    But PLEASE note one BIG annoyance..journal volume numbers and dates are NOT given in the journal volume listing. So necessary to trawl through volume by volume to find the one I’m looking for, as even when in date order there are duplications and sometimes volumes missing !

  16. Jampa Namgyal

    I have just ended the analysis of 1/3 of the IA texts that can be browsed under the tag ‘language=italian’, and with my surprise I found many times a heavy difference between the declared and the real.
    In fact, only about the 75 per cent of the texts labelled ‘Italian’ are written in Italian. Of the remaining 25 per cent, more or less a half are written in Portuguese, then in Latin, then a few in Spanish, French, German and, last, English.

    In this moment, the texts declared as ‘Italian’ are 45,974. This means that the ‘real’ Italian texts could be more or less 34,500.

    It’d be interesting to know how the language attribution is performed by IA. If it is a software algorithm, it is simple to argue the fact that many words in Portuguese, Spanish, Latin and Italian can easily overlap in appearance if not in meaning.

    I hope that the same algorithm may make the same mistake (reversed) in those similar languages – so the general balance is restored. Anyhow it is better to search a text using safe elements like ‘title’ or ‘author’.

    My second point here is that the possibility of reviewing the item is not a connection with the ‘sytem administration’ in order to correct errors or omissions. The review remains dead letter. I wrote a number of reviews in which I gave notice of the language misattribution, but they are one-way communications. What about a change in this matter?

    Anyhow, thanks for the huge work performed. I greatly appreciate it.

      1. Jampa Namgyal

        Hi, brewster.
        I’m interested. As you know, the road to hell in paved with good intentions, but we can try.
        You have my e-mail – please use it to establish the correct know-how and the road map of the matter.
        I’ll follow.
        Hear you next time.

  17. Jessica

    I’m using Project Gutenberg now since several months and can say that I really like. There are many inspiring books that really helped with my studies.

    Highly recommended from me.

  18. JC

    Truly an amazing achievement. We’re all about supporting better reading/writing and plan to donate books ASAP.

    It’s a good idea for everyone to spread the word: don’t toss your books, donate them to the Internet Archive.

  19. Homer Otto Goodall

    I have about 3000 books I am now scanning and I will be uploading them in the future. This doesn’t include 10 tb of films recovered from old computer hard drives, old homemade dvd’s, and other sources.

  20. Iftekhar Ahmed

    Book is the best friend and Archive have a sum of 3000000 friends inside, one who desire to get more friends must peep inside Archive as well!
    Great Congratulations!

  21. subbarao

    Useful web to all , you all doing good job and good service to feature ,
    How can i got print from DjVu files.please.
    Thanks.

  22. Homer Otto Goodall

    I will go and get a thumb drive. The ones I have scanned and assembled are

    Powder Valley Payoff a very rare pulp paper book

    Fundamentals of Chemistry

    Applied Chemistry for Nurses

    E.L. Godkin and American Foreign Policy 1865 to 1900

    The Great Fog Weird Tales of Terror and Detection

    Light in My Window

    CRAM Outer Space and World Globe Handbook

    Favorite Country Cooking

    Ross’s Business English

    The Parish School Hymnal

    Just Jenifer

    This is just a small taste. I’ve become a book hoarder and need to get rid of a few in the paper version.

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