Welcome to literature.org

On this site you will find classic works of English literature. Fiction from writers like Lewis Carroll, the Bronte sisters (Anne, Charlotte and Emily), Jack London, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, non-fiction from Charles Darwin and Rene Descartes and more.

Start here:

Please let us know what you think and feel free to make suggestions. For those who may not be familiar with Copyright law, we are unable to make works available that are not in the public domain. This means, basically, almost nothing until the author has been dead for either 75 to 90 years.

Contact Us: [email protected]

Site Update - August 2021 - Downloads are here!

It's been a quiet time for us at literature.org but recently we've added a selection of new books for your to enjoy and also the first version of a new download feature! Look for the Download icon on the contents page of each book (like this: cloud_download) and this will build an EPub file for you to download to your device.

These EPub files are built dynamically entirely in your browser from the files on the web-site and so if you see any problems then please check that your browser is a modern one that supports HTML5 and so on. All popular browsers do right now, as long as you keep them updated. If you are unfortunate enough to still be using IE then it will not work.

We're working on adding other formats such as Mobi so that you can download books to a wider range of readers, including Kindle devices, but EPub was the most straight forward to implement as it's an open standard based on web technologies. Mobi (and Amazon's Kindle formats) are less straightforward. You can always convert the EPub files yourself in something like the excellent Calibre application.

Site Update - June 2020

We've made further improvements to the site and we would like to hear your comments. Just drop us an email at [email protected]. Some of the changes include:

  • check Links to online biographies and other sites for authors and their books. This is still being filled out.
  • check The lists of authors and books will now display in one, two or three columns depending on your screen size
  • check On a mobile phone, tablet or other touchscreen device you can swipe left and right to move between chapters in a book
  • check More books (of course!)

There are more gradual changes coming, stay tuned!

Site Update - May 2020

This site fell off the Internet a few years ago after some embarrassing oversights and confusion around backups. Don't let this happen to you! Be more careful than we were.

The original site contents have now been mostly rescued with the wonderful help of The Wayback Machine and this Wayback Machine Downloader. Thanks to all those who provide these great tools for free.

After some work and lots of learning about how web technologies have evolved we can present this new version of the site. The aim has been to update the look of the site to give it a more modern feel, to make it work well on different device types and to improve navigation through the library.

For those interested all the changes are on the client side and based on W3.CSS. We have tried to keep the client-side scripting as simple as possible and to avoid large frameworks. We hope that the behind the scenes changes will also make it more straightforward to update and add new books.

There will be continual improvements where possible to your experience and any suggestions are more than welcome, even if we cannot promise to act on them.

Please note: This site collects no personal data at all. The hosting provider may collect logs of web traffic but we don't see those. The site is based completely static files. It does however rely on JavaScript being enabled in your browser.

About literature.org: This site, including all the code that drives it and the tools that help convert books to the right format for the site are all on GitHub.