(30 free posts about free resources for homeschooling)
I mentioned some of these yesterday, and I figured that “online books” needed its own post. There are a whole lot of great books offered for free online. Sure, it might be tedious to browse through what’s there, but you do what you can with what you have. You probably already know about the free books from Amazon and B&N, so I’ll skip those.
Bartleby – http://www.bartleby.com/
Lots of great things here – poetry, anthologies, quotes, references. It takes the place of all those shelves of books that you might have had. As an example, this page – http://www.bartleby.com/107/ – has Gray’s Anatomy –- click on the link on the page and it will take you to the 1918 publication with the text and diagrams. The site is well put together.
Online Books – http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/
Lots and lots of books, but a little tough to navigate if you don’t know what you’re looking for. Still, hats off to the creator and editor of the site for making it available. Things like this take tons of time, money, and effort. And since it’s all text and PDFs, browsing and page loading is quick, not having to render lots of formatting, tables, and the like. And there’s no push for donations. Several of their books are not in the public domain/out-of-print-/out-of-copyright, but are offered for free by the authors – so you’ll read things that you might not read for free elsewhere.
Project Gutenberg – https://www.gutenberg.org/
Here you’ll find over 46K free e-books for reading online, downloading as an epub or Kindle book, or just plain text. A well-developed and easy to navigate site, Gutenberg has focused on producing high-quality e-books. They have a page (here: https://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Volunteering_for_Project_Gutenberg) about volunteering, so you and your homeschool may wish to make that part of your schooling.
BookBub – https://www.bookbub.com/home/
Not all of these are free, but signing up is free. There are plenty of offerings here, mostly popular titles, but you can read on any device. You can get emails with the daily deals (it shows both free and what’s on sale), but that may annoy you, so you can opt out of the notifications. But it’s another option if you want to be made aware of what’s out there.
Read Any Book – http://www.readanybook.com/
Not necessarily a source for scholarly information, but you can still access lots of books here. You’ll need to sign up (it’s free).
Adobe Reader/Adobe Acrobat Reader DC – https://get.adobe.com/reader/
While not a source for online books, if you have a PDF that you need read out loud by the computer (maybe you want your children to learn to pay attention, or you need to leave the room for a bit…it’s nice to be aware of the options) then you can put this in Read Aloud mode and it will read what you’ve selected from one of those free PDFs that you downloaded. Sure, it’s a rather monotone computerized voice, but it’s still amazing!
Just remember that, whatever your situation, you have what it takes and what you need to homeschool.
Happy Homeschooling!
Anything is Progress 