Reading Lamp browses thousands of books live (over 75,000 books!) through Project Gutenberg's free library. Every cover and every "read" link comes straight from Gutenberg itself.
This site is a discovery layer only. It does not host, store, mirror, or serve any book file, and it never will.
The catalog is pulled live from Project Gutenberg, whose entire library consists of texts confirmed free of U.S. copyright, mostly because their copyright term has expired.
Gutendex is a free, open, community-run API that mirrors Project Gutenberg's own catalog metadata. We query it live in your browser; nothing is scraped or cached on our end.
The "Read on Project Gutenberg" button uses the exact file URL that Gutendex reports for that title, so it opens the actual text, not a search page.
Public domain status here is based on U.S. law. A handful of countries have longer or shorter terms, so if you're outside the U.S., it's worth a quick check before redistributing a title yourself.
More legal free-book resources worth knowing: