Thanks to the work of many devoted volunteers and welcome donations, the online library Project Gutenberg can propose more than 75,000 free eBooks.
For those familiar with the Youtube subculture known as “Booktube”, Project Gutenberg is regularly mentioned – more than archive.org, because it provides an easy way to get hold of a variety of books, from classics of literature to poetry or short stories, not to mention essays about social science, art, religion and whatnot, all of these absolutely free for the reader.
Several categories are available. For example if you look into the “History-Ancient” category, you will find books such as Germania by Tacitus, the History by Herodotus or Lysistrata by Aristophanes. Many of these will be available in different formats, which means in plain text, mobi or epub for e-book readers, html or pdf. More than that, some of these books can be found directly in Greek or Latin, as is the case for Oedipus Rex, Οιδίπους Τύραννος, by Sophocles. The text is easy to copy-paste because it has been carefully proofread after the OCR process, something you won’t find everywhere.
Many of the books available are in English as one can guess by seeing the front page of the website, but one must not be misled by a hasty judgement. Indeed, the curious reader by clicking on the “Reading Lists” tab will be able to wander about smaller specific categories ordered alphabetically in which he will find, at the letter F for instance, French written books like la Chartreuse de Parme or Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, but he will also find Italian or German litterature.
What you won’t find on this website is the possibility of consulting high resolution scans of ancient documents, manuscrits, etc., something Gallica would propose. Project Gutenberg is more mainstream-oriented, at least concerning Classical humanities, so it does not provide the large array of potentialities a website like Perseus would for instance, and which could be useful for a researcher. Moreover, there are no tools regarding the lexicon, no scientific commentaries and a non-existent hypertextuality. Instead it offers a standard “ready-to-read” text for most common devices and softwares, which is in itself very interesting.
Warning : it is strongly recommended to type your requests in English (often more close to the Greek or Latin name). Indeed you will have zero results if you search for Eschyle. You must type Aeschylus. Same thing if you search for Ciceron. Instead it has to be Cicero.
