nothing in the rulebook

Just a few years ago, the Kindle was being blamed for the death of the traditional book. Literary analysts circled the publishing and sales figures of giant and independent publishing houses alike, looking to confirm the trend so many expected. Yet the last few years have seen a reversal of fortune for e-books – showing quite a dramatic reversal of fortunes, with sales of ebooks plunging by over 20% since 2016, while sales of physical books increase.

Yet while sales of e-books may be decreasing, the fundamental benefits of digital, electronic copies of books has changed. They are still a great means of saving space on your bookshelves, while also carrying multiple titles around with you on the move without forcing you to lug heavy weighted tomes with you.

So, here at Nothing in the Rulebook, we’ve done you a solid. To compliment our collections of free online literature courses, as well as places you can download literary texts and plays for free (and entirely legally), we’ve brought you a list of famous books that you can now download and read online without spending a penny.

Below, you can find links to works by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, Neil Gaiman and Ernest Hemingway (among others), while also brushing up on epic works from the literary canon like the Epic of Gilgamesh and Aesop’s Fables.

Check out the list below – happy reading, amigos!

• Aesop’s Fables, by (well), Aesop
• The Legend of Beowulf (via the University of Adelaide)
• The Epic of Gilgamesh
• Emma, by Jane Austen
• Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen
• Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
• Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen
• Songs of Innocence and Experience, by William Blake
• The Library of Babel, by Jorge Luis Borges
• Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte
• The Stranger, by Albert Camus
• Cathedral, by Raymond Carver
• The Canterbury Tales, by Chaucer
• Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
• On the Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin
• Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe,
• A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens
• Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Tender is the Night, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• I, Cthulhu, by Neil Gaiman
• The Case of the Four and Twenty Blackbirds, by Neil Gaiman
• Cinnamon, by Neil Gaiman
• Howl, by Alan Ginsberg
• The First 49 Stories, by Ernest Hemingway (only available in Kindle format)
• Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce
• Dubliners, by James Joyce
• Finnegan’s Wake, by James Joyce
• The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka
• The Communist Manifesto, by Marx and Engels
• Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
• 1984, by George Orwell
• Ariel, by Sylvia Plath
• The Complete Works of Shakespeare
• Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley,
• The Elements of Style, by William Strunk Jr.
• Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift
• War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain
• A Journey to the Centre of the Earth, by Jules Verne
• The Drone, by Kurt Vonnegut
• 28 Articles and Short Stories by David Foster Wallace (via Nothing in the Rulebook)
• The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells
• Picture of Dorian Grey, by Oscar Wilde
• Mrs Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf