Related

gutenberg.org — about 79,000 texts, and the spine of this library. Founded 1971, the oldest digital library there is.

Gutenberg's advantage is that a human proofread the text. These are not scans: they are transcriptions, corrected by volunteers, offered as EPUB, a Kindle file and plain text. They also do the copyright clearance before posting, which is the real service — a Gutenberg title is one you can rely on being free in the US.

Two things to know. Gutenberg's robot access policy states plainly that "the Project Gutenberg website is intended for human users only", and blocks IP addresses that scrape it; clicking a download link is fine, pointing a crawler at it is not. And their trademark is separate from the texts — strip the Gutenberg header and licence from a file and the text is yours to do anything with, as their licence sets out.

en.wikisource.org — the Wikimedia Foundation's transcription project, and the reason this library has an I Ching and a Lotus Sutra at all.

Wikisource fills gaps Gutenberg leaves, particularly in Asian scripture. Its texts are proofread against page scans and carry free licences. Downloads come from ws-export, a Wikimedia service that assembles the pages of a work into a single EPUB.

The catch is that coverage is uneven and a work's index page exists whether or not anyone has transcribed the contents. Ten of the fifty Sacred Books of the East volumes have real text; the rest are tables of contents that export as a twenty-kilobyte shell. Every Wikisource link in this library has been size-checked, and anything that came back a stub was replaced with an Internet Archive scan.

archive.org — scanned books, and the fallback when nobody has transcribed a work.

These are page images with machine-read text underneath, so quality varies with the scan. What the Archive has is breadth: the complete Sacred Books of the East, the Pahlavi texts, Darmesteter's Zend-Avesta, translations that exist in one 1890s edition and nowhere else. Most items offer EPUB, PDF and a plain-text OCR transcript.

Prefer a Gutenberg or Wikisource edition when one exists. Reach for the Archive when it does not.

standardebooks.org — Gutenberg texts, typeset properly.

Volunteers take a public-domain text, fix the typography, build a real table of contents, add a cover, and release it under a public domain dedication. The result is the best-looking free EPUB available. The catalogue is small and literary — a few hundred titles, mostly novels — so it contributes little to the religious texts shelf, but it will matter when the fiction shelves go up.

No links to individual Standard Ebooks titles appear in this library yet. Their robots file asks automated clients to stay off the download paths, so those URLs have not been machine-verified the way every other link here has, and an unverified link is not one to publish.

The Internet Sacred Text Archive is the best-known collection of religious texts online and an obvious place to look. It is deliberately not linked from these pages: its robots file disallows the crawler this site's tooling runs under, so its URLs cannot be verified the way the rest of the library's can. Visit it directly if you want it — just do not expect links from here.

• The Reading Room — the library.
• Public Domain Books — what public domain permits.
• E-readers and Kindle — getting a file onto a device.