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Or in any format you like here: https://archive.org/details/Harvard-Classics or https://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Harvard_Classics_(Bookshelf)

EDIT: added Project Gutenberg link.



Slight self promotion, but Standard Ebooks has a few of the classics, and a few more of the classic fiction available as nicely formatted and accessible PD ebooks (epub, Kobo variant epub, and Kindle formats for each):

- The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/benjamin-franklin/the-auto...

- Meditations by Marcus Aurelius: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/marcus-aurelius/meditation...

- Don Quixote by Cervantes: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/miguel-de-cervantes-saaved...

- Pride and Predudice by Jane Austen: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/jane-austen/pride-and-prej...

- Vanity Fair by William Thackeray: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/william-makepeace-thackera...

- David Copperfield by Charles Dickens: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/charles-dickens/david-copp...

- Washington Irving collection: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/washington-irving/the-sket...

- Father Goriot by Balzac: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/honore-de-balzac/father-go...

- The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/j-w-von-goethe/the-sorrows...

- Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/fyodor-dostoevsky/crime-an...

These are nearly always taken from the Gutenberg source transcriptions, but tidied up typographically and marked up using modern technologies. If you notice any problems with any of these we’ll happily take PRs!


Thanks for Standard; it really adds a missing piece to the landscape.


+1 for Standard Ebooks. Great work!


At the risk of looking a gift horse in the mouth, the ePub versions I tried are rather unreadable, at least for me. Too many erroneously omitted spaces between words, odd hyphens breaking a word up in the middle of a paragraph, and mis-spellings.


I have this issue on all the epubs I have downloaded on archive.org, the converter they use (pandoc?) seems to give bad results on pdf-epub.


If you have low quality source, eg OCRed scans, then you’ll never get a high quality ePub. It needs manual intervention and proofing to keep quality up. Not to say that archive.org isn’t useful - I’ve produced a collection of Keats poetry[1] as an ePub from their OCRed source in the past - but it’s not really consumable as is.

[1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/john-keats/poetry


Yeah, I came here just to say that. I downloaded and unzipped the archive, then opened a few. The ones I looked at were badly formatted and had no TOC as well.




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