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Thousands of classics are in the public domain, and volunteer libraries share them as free e-books. Here are three of them, how to download an EPUB file from each, and how to open it on this site.
Standard Ebooks makes carefully proofread, well typeset editions of public-domain books in English, and gives its own work to the public domain as well. The twelve English classics on our home page come from there.
To download: open a book's page and choose its Compatible epub file. It works in every reader, this one included; the advanced epub and the Kindle and Kobo files are meant for other readers.
Standard Ebooks is a volunteer project, not affiliated with Silent Book.
Project Gutenberg is the oldest digital library: more than 75,000 free e-books, most of them in English, many in other languages, Russian among them.
To download: search for a book, open its page and choose EPUB3 (or EPUB, for older devices). Its Plain Text file opens here too.
Its books are free in the United States, where their copyright has ended; Project Gutenberg asks readers in other countries to check the copyright law of their own country first.
Project Gutenberg is not affiliated with Silent Book.
Wikisource is a library of source texts that volunteers type in and check, a Wikimedia project in many languages: the English Wikisource and the Russian Wikisource among them. Its pages are shared under the CC BY-SA licence; the twelve Russian classics on our home page are made from Russian Wikisource.
To download: open a work's main page, the one with its contents, find its download link (in the side menu, or the download button on the page) and choose EPUB.
Wikisource is not affiliated with Silent Book.
None of the three offers FB2 files; an FB2 file you have from elsewhere opens here just the same.
Silent Book keeps some Wikisource books as EPUB files of its own, each with a page: free books in English and in 13 more languages.
Each classic on our home page has a page of its own too, to read it in your browser: classics in English and in Russian.
A book is in the public domain once its copyright has ended, and when that happens depends on the country: in many countries 70 years after the author's death, in the United States by the year it was published. Project Gutenberg and Standard Ebooks follow the law of the United States. Where you live, a book may still be under copyright, so check the law of your own country.
Back on the home page, press Open your own book and pick the file you downloaded, or drop it onto the page. It opens in your browser: nothing is uploaded, and the book stays on your device. On a computer a downloaded file is usually in the Downloads folder; on a phone, in Downloads in the Files app.
Want a quiet sound while you read? Pick rain, a campfire, the sea or another quiet scene: it stays for every book you open.