About BooksBarbecue
BooksBarbecue is a free library of classic books that you can read in your browser or download as PDF. There is nothing to buy, no account to create and no advertising following you around.
Our mission
Great books belong to everyone. Once a book's copyright has expired, it becomes part of our shared cultural heritage, yet many readers still find these works hard to reach: scattered across websites, wrapped in advertising, hidden behind sign-up forms or published in files that are awkward to read on a phone. We built BooksBarbecue to make the most important books of the past easy to find, quick to open and pleasant to read, on any device and on any connection.
What you will find here
The library is made up of public-domain literature: novels, short stories, poetry, plays, essays, philosophy, history, travel writing and children's classics. Each book has its own page with a description, the author, the year of first publication, an approximate length and a clear statement of its licence. From there you can open the book in the online reader or, where a PDF is provided, download it.
- Browse by genre to explore a category, or search by title or author to jump straight to a book.
- Save books for later on your own device. Your list never leaves your browser.
- Read at your own pace in short pages that are easy to scan and quick to load.
How the reader works
Long texts are tiring when they arrive as one endless page, so the reader divides every book into short pages of roughly five hundred words. You can move forward and back with a single tap, jump to any page number, and open a contents list built from the book's own chapter headings. The text size can be made larger or smaller, you can switch between a serif and a sans-serif typeface, and the whole site follows your device's light or dark setting. The reader remembers where you stopped, so you can close the tab and return later to the same spot. Nothing about this is sent to us: it is stored on your device only.
If you prefer paper or an offline copy, use Save as PDF on the book page. Where we host a ready-made PDF you can download that file instead.
How we choose and prepare books
Before a book is added we check that it is free of copyright in the way we describe, or that the rights holder has given permission to share it. The text itself is prepared for reading: headers, footers and licence boilerplate that belong to the original source are removed, links and scripts are stripped out, and formatting is simplified to headings, paragraphs and emphasis so that every book looks the same and loads quickly. Illustrations and pictures that belong to the book are kept in place. We aim to keep the author's text intact, including spelling and punctuation of the period. Our goal is a faithful, readable copy, not a modernised one.
Built for speed and privacy
The site uses plain, lightweight pages with no third-party fonts, no advertising scripts and no tracking cookies. That keeps it fast on older phones and slow networks, and it means we do not collect the kind of data that most websites do. We count page views and downloads per book so that we know which titles readers value, but we do not build profiles of people. Read our privacy policy for the details.
Respecting authors and rights holders
Public domain does not mean the same thing everywhere. A work may be free to share in one country and still protected in another, and some modern editions, translations or annotations carry their own copyright even when the underlying text does not. We take this seriously. If you believe something on this site should not be here, our copyright and takedown page explains exactly how to tell us, and we act on valid notices promptly.
For authors, translators and publishers
If you hold the rights to a book and would like it to reach more readers, we are happy to talk about adding it to the library on terms that suit you. Use the contact form and choose "Suggest a book" or "Copyright question".
Accessibility
We want everyone to be able to read here. Pages use real headings and landmarks, links and buttons can be reached with a keyboard, text can be enlarged, colours keep strong contrast in both light and dark mode, and motion is kept to a minimum. If you meet a barrier, please tell us and we will do our best to fix it.