Literature resources

 

Literature is one of the pillars of any educational system, and of course the key to literature is reading a lot of books. Fortunately, many of the great books we often want our children to read and hear are available for free if you know where to go. There is certainly value in traditional paper books, but it’s also possible to supplement traditional materials with e-books and other online resources.  You do not need a specialized ebook reader to read literature online.  Most of the resources I describe in this article can be read on a computer, a tablet, or even a phone.  

 

US copyright law allows books to be released into the public domain some time after the author has died. (The exact time span has changed through the years, but is now 70 years after the author’s death in most cases.)  This means a book that was written before the 1930s may be available for free if you know how to look.

 

Note that not every book that is in an electronic format is available for free.  However, there are many resources for purchasing e-books online legally, including Amazon.com, the iTunes store, and more. For this article, I concentrate on the free resources you might not already know about. 

 

Any discussion of literature on the web must begin with Project Gutenberg. The basic idea of this project is to gather all the literature that is in the common domain and make it available to anyone.  The result is an excellent online library consisting of thousands of books in many languages.  Check out the site at http://www.gutenberg.org/ to get a feel for the various offerings on this incredible site. Most of the books on this site can be downloaded in a number of formats that can be read on a normal computer or any e-reader.  As the site focuses on books in the public domain, these tend to be older books.  Many of the classic books you may want to assign for a literature class will be available for free on this site. Note that the site has a wide variety of books, and not all topics are suitable for children. You will definitely want to be with children as they look for materials on the site. (There is no objectionable images or words on the site itself, but there are some works with prurient content in the archive.) 

 

The online books page is a project of the University of Pennsylvania library.  It includes over a million titles available to read freely on the Internet.  While it has some of the same content as the Gutenberg project, it also has materials from other sources.  I found this to be an especially good resource for non-fiction materials, and books that have more recently entered the public domain.

 

This wonderful resource contains hundreds of children’s books (mostly from the 1930s and earlier.)  While most of the titles are not familiar to modern readers, you’re very likely to find interesting books to read together. The history section is especially interesting.

 

This site offers an interesting alternative: free audio books.  While these books are quite a bit larger downloads than their more traditional cousins,  audio books can be very fun for long car rides or commuting.  All of the books are read by volunteers, so the quality can vary, but reading part of a classic book to add to the archive might be a very interesting project.  It’s possible to download an entire book at once or subscribe to it as a podcast.  

 

Bibliomania is an interesting site which gives you access to a number of the same e-books that are available on the other sites.  The more intriguing part of the site is the other resources, including a teacher’s research center, study guides (many written by Oxford scholars) and research reseources. 

 

A number of universities have begun releasing videos of popular courses online for free. (Several of my own classes are available in this format.)  The freevideolectures site has complete courses on a number of interesting literature topics, from Dante to the New Testament.

 

There’s always debate about whether students should read study guides.  I personally think they can be helpful after reading a book, but are no substitute for reading the actual work.  Still, they can be useful, and students will definitely find them, so parents or teachers should know about them. This site features nice guides for many works.  Each book includes overviews, character summaries, and discussion of themes and concepts in the book at hand.

 

Shakespeare is important in any literature program, and additional resources can help students get a more complete appreciation of Shakespeare’s works. The Shakespeare resource center has a number of helpful resources for studying these works, including synopses of every play, a detailed biography of Shakespeare, a series of resources on Shakespearean language, and a number of interesting essays and articles about the Bard and his works.