These titles are often available in plain text as well as other formats, and can be read online or downloaded to personal devices. The work of digitizing and proof-reading these works is done entirely by volunteers. Project Gutenberg is known for its collection of classic works, available for free because their copyright has expired. Open Library is a part of the non-profit Internet Archive, and as such is continually updating its collection of links to free books online-including lots for children! They currently offer access to over 20,000 free titles for children, including newer titles and classics. Each book includes supplemental curriculum developed by a credentialed elementary educator, aiming to strengthen comprehension and verbal and written skills for English-language learners. Readers include Viola Davis, Chris Pine, Lily Tomlin, Kevin Costner, Annette Bening, James Earl Jones, Betty White and dozens more. This site streams featuring celebrated actors reading children’s books alongside creatively produced illustrations. The children’s literacy website Storyline Online is run by the SAG-AFTRA Foundation. After registering (which is free), you gain free access to many of Oxford’s ebooks for free, along with other guides and games to help children develop their reading skills. Oxford Owl is an award-winning website from Oxford University Press, created to support children’s learning both at home and at school. The books can be read anywhere you have access to an Internet connection, in your browser. The International Children’s Digital Library (ICDL) is a nonprofit organization with the mission to “promote tolerance and a respect for diverse cultures by providing access to the best of children’s literature from around the world.” This is a great choice to allow you and your children to read diversely, and includes more than 4,000 titles from authors around the world, in more than 50 languages. Like the rest of their website, you can drill down to find what you need here by age range, subject, user ratings, and more. The ICDL has been our labor of love, and we will always remember these books, the volunteers, libraries, publishers, and readers around the world with great fondness.If you have a Nook, there are numerous free ebooks available for free download from Barnes & Noble. Our licenses for the books are for use only by the ICDL so while we have considered a number of alternatives, none of them really made sense.Īnd so now it is time to say goodbye and read with the innumerable other resources in the world. The servers are very old and dusty and there is no one to maintain them. And now all of the founders have moved on to other things in their lives. And we did that without ever exposing children to commercial activities or risking their privacy.īut for many years, we have served this mission without any funds. After all these years, as far we know, we are still the largest collection of freely available complete children’s books from around the world. We launched at a time when the concept of reading books online was a bit odd, and almost unheard of for children’s books. In that time, we have served about 15 million people reading over 1,000,000 hours of children’s books. It has been over 20 years since we launched the International Children’s Digital Library. Thank you for so many of your heart-warming and gracious emails which encouraged us to find a way to keep the ICDL alive. Please note that we do not have the right to allow you to redistribute these books further, and they are provided to you only for personal use. But about 1,000 of the books are back, and we will work on bringing back more books and at least some aspects of the original site. We had to create a vastly simpler site without many, many of the features - no search, no translations, etc. Good news! Thanks to the UMD Computer Science Department, which has agreed to host a static version of ICDL, we have been able to resuscitate the library a bit, and have brought back 1/4 of the books in PDF form (that we have "download" rights for). The site is fast and reliable and should be able to stay around for some time to come. The interface is not what it used to be, and we no longer have translations of books (only the original language the book was published in) - but we have all ~4,000 books back. Great news! I was able to rebuild a simple version of the in-browser book reader which has enabled me to add back all of the ICDL books.
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