In order to fully understand English-language literature your English vocabulary should be rich enough to understand around 95% of a text. The rest can be learned later on or picked up from context. How do we convert these 95% into thousands of words? Experts agree that the vocabulary of 3000 or 4000 words is enough to grasp the idea of most English texts. There also exists a theory of a “Magic Thousand” – these are the most common English words that allow you to understand any text in English. Advocates of this theory usually cite different researches according to which an author usually uses no more than 1000 words to write a book. However, always keep in mind that these words differ depending on the topic, style, and genre. Fat chance 1000 words you know and those used by this very author are same exact words. So before diving into English literature it might be a good idea to take online courses of English at EDUGET platform to boost your vocabulary, brush up on common idioms, unpack problems with words seeming alike.     

So, the next step is to pick your favourite genre (studying should be enjoyable) and start reading. There is plenty of information on English-language literature on the web. To make things easier people from Ukraine Speaking put together a list of resources providing free and legal access to books in English.

Project Gutenberg

gutenberg.org

This is the oldest universal e-library founded in 1971. The library consists mainly of public domain books. Project volunteers see their aim in promoting cultural assets. Project Gutenberg has an impressive collection of more than 40 thousand free books, as well as music and audio books.

Wikiteca

wikisource.org

The project of Free Library was launched by Wikimedia foundation in order to store texts that can be freely distributed. Here you may find books in different languages, not only in English. The main requirement is to give copyright credit.

Google Play

play.google.com

Google Store offers free and paid books. You can choose the most popular in the category of free books or browse them by genre. To start reading you should sign in with your login and select the desired book.

Open Library

openlibrary.org

The project is founded by a non-profit organization Internet Archive. Its aim is to create a web page for every book ever published. Now there are more than 1 million digitized books available for you to read. There is also a list of books from Boston Public Library. You may choose any book you need and it will be digitized and uploaded on the website.

The Online Books Page

onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu

This project does not store books but indexes them. There are different catalogues and registers where you can find a book you need and follow the link to its actual storage. The aim of project founders is to have 2 million books in free access.

Bartleby.com

bartleby.com

A website is created in 1993 as an e-library of classical English literature. Project is named after Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener”. There is also reference literature, encyclopedias, and historical works.

University of Oxford Text Archive

ota.ox.ac.uk

A vast archive of the Oxford University contains fiction, memoirs, letters, as well as works on literary research, linguistics, and cultural studies.

E-Books Directory

e-booksdirectory.com

Project is known for a wide choice of topics. Now there are more than 9000 free books in 671 categories. You can add your own books or articles and comment on existing ones.

World Public Library

worldlibrary.org

Although it is a non-profit project, you have to pay $8,95 per year for using the resource– this money is needed to support the e-library. Despite the fee, we have included the project in our list because of its exceptionally rich collection. Now there are about 3 million books in more than 300 languages in the library. The books have been written for the past 1000 years and embrace all fields of knowledge: education, sociology, technologies, history, religion etc.