Project Gutenberg

covers over 6000 full-text ebooks. Titles are presented in ASCII format or are available for download using FTP.

There are three portions of the Project Gutenberg Library, basically be described as:

Light Literature; such as Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass, Peter Pan, Aesop's Fables, etc.

Heavy Literature; such as the Bible or other religious documents, Shakespeare, Moby Dick, Paradise Lost, etc.

References; such as Roget's Thesaurus, almanacs, and a set of encyclopedia, dictionaries, etc.

Ther texts are taken from books published pre-1923. (It's more complicated than that, as the Copyright Page explains, but 1923 is a good first rule-of-thumb for the U.S.A.)

So you won't find the latest bestsellers or modern computer books here. You will find the classic books from the start of this century and previous centuries, from authors like Shakespeare, Poe, Dante, as well as well-loved favorites like the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Tarzan and Mars books of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Alice's adventures in Wonderland as told by Lewis Carroll, and thousands of others.