About the site

Welcome to Classic Stories. Here you can read classic books and stories in the English they were written in, from the first page to the last, free and with no sign-up.

What you'll find here

• The full text of every book and story: not a summary, not an excerpt.
• Reading in your browser, with nothing to download and no account.
• A clean page made for reading on a phone: your place is saved, and you can change the text size, font, spacing and background.
• The original illustrations where the books had them.
• Books by Arthur Conan Doyle, Jack London, L. Frank Baum, Beatrix Potter, A. A. Milne, Robert Louis Stevenson, J. M. Barrie, Rudyard Kipling, Lewis Carroll, Louisa May Alcott, Daniel Defoe, Herman Melville, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, H. G. Wells and Jules Verne.

Where the texts come from

The texts on the English site come from public-domain editions on Project Gutenberg. Books first written in English are the original text. We only tidy the layout for reading on screen: paragraphs, chapter headings, and the marks that plain-text editions use for italics.

Jules Verne wrote in French, so his books are here in their nineteenth-century English translations, and each one names its translator. They are as old as they sound, and some of them shorten or change Verne's text.

The site began in Hebrew, with these classics translated in full. Use the עברית link in the menu to read the Hebrew version of any book.

Copyright

The books on the English site are in the public domain in the United States. Copyright terms differ between countries, so if you live elsewhere, check your local law before copying a text. The Hebrew translations on the site are our own work, shared under CC BY-NC 4.0.

Contact

We'd love to hear from you: suggestions, books you'd like to see, or anything else. Write to us at yonidors@gmail.com.

For accessibility, see our accessibility statement.