Bookshare contains more than 10,000 freely available public domain or Creative Commons licensed titles that anyone can access, even without a qualifying disability for Bookshare or without an active Bookshare subscription. You may find having access to these freely available books helpful to demo how Bookshare works.
Due to the constraints of copyright law, we cannot provide access to copyrighted books to anyone who does not meet the Bookshare eligibility criteria. Once you find books that meet this freely available criteria, you can read them or share them with others since these books are freely available to anyone. If you are a Bookshare member, you can add any of these books to a Reading List. If you are a Sponsor on an organization account, you can assign the book to a member listed on your account.
Finding freely available titles by browsing special collections
- Log into your Bookshare account.
- We suggest selecting a book from one of these lists:
- Freely Available Books for All – fiction and non-fiction titles of varying grade levels
- Freely Available Children’s Books – books for second graders and younger
- Freely Available Upskilling Books – how-to books for those who wish to learn a new skill, prepare to go back to school, or switch careers
- Select the “Read Now” button next to the title of the book (if available) to open the book in Bookshare Reader for Web, a customizable browser-based tool for quick and easy reading.
- You may also download the book in your preferred format, depending on the reading tool you wish to use.
Finding freely available titles by Searching the entire Bookshare collection
- Log in to your Bookshare account
- Under the Library heading, select the My Books link. The Advanced Seach link is under the main search box. You can also go directly to the Advanced Search page.
- Choose “Freely Available Books” from the list of which “Books to Search”
- You may want to further limit your search, selecting categories or books with images, etc.
- Select the “Advanced Search” button.
- Bookshare will display the list of freely-available books in the search results screen.
- You can further refine your search using these filters and drop-down options in the left-hand menu.
- Sort the list by Copyright Date so that the most recent books appear first.
- Select specific language(s) or authors from the drop-down lists.
- Identify the category or categories of books you would like to include