Electronic books and media

General

• creativecommons.org has a Get Content page that lists lots of content in various media available under Creative Commons licenses.
• Tufts University’s Perseus Digital Library has a number of classical texts (in the original and in translation), as well as a few other text collections. (new)

Collaborative ebooks

• At Wikibooks (http://en.wikibooks.org/), “We are developing free, open content textbooks, manuals and other texts. We currently have over 120 textbooks in various stages of development, of which every page is open to your revision and addition.”
• The Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/) is a collaboratively-developed free encyclopedia.

Other ebooks

• ePub Books lists ebooks, both commercial and free, in the vendor-neutral ePub format. (new)
• Baen Books provide the Baen Free Library of recent science-fiction. How cool is that? Buy their paper books, and tell them why!
• The Colorado School of Mines has a samizdat section at http://samizdat.mines.edu/ with free scientific and technical books.
• There's a copy of 1984 online at http://www.online-literature.com/.
• http://lib.ru/, the `Library of Maksim Moshkov', appears to be a Russian analogue to Project Gutenberg or ibiblio.org. Their home page is in Russian, but they've also got a collection of English translations of Russian `prose and science fiction' (sic) at http://lib.ru/TRANSLATION/.

Visual arts

• Deviant Art (http://www.deviantart.com/) has user-contributed artwork, fonts, stock photos, themes/skins, and so forth. While they are all (assuming the submitter complies with the agreement on the site) free to download and use, they may not necessarily be free to redistribute.

Video

• The Internet Archive and Prelinger Archives are producing an archive of public-domain or otherwise redistributable movies. (It's theoretically also at http://moviearchive.org/, but that link isn't working for me right now.)
• Pocket Movies (http://www.pocketmovies.net/) is a site with various movies in MPEG format, including commercial trailers and noncommercial work (like film-school projects). Most of it is available in a couple different resolutions, and the site is aimed at PocketPC users, although they play fine under Linux (for instance with Xine, mplayer, or the mpeg_play included with the SDL library - sorry for not including links). Pretty cool.

Audio

• RadioLovers.com (new) has old-time radio shows for free in MP3 format — stuff like Flash Gordon, Gunsmoke, Benny Goodman, and so forth. US copyright law prior to 1973 seems to mean that this stuff is in the public domain. Lots of stuff that’s interesting, culturally important, and worth listening to, but that would probably not have enough commercial value decades after its production to be on the market if it were still under copyright. (Nowadays, anything newly produced is automatically copyrighted, and copyright lasts about a hundred years. Think what that means for your great-grandchildren’s access to the stuff you’re listening to now.)

Web content

• The main project of the Internet Archive is to provide `snapshots' of Internet content, otherwise likely to be somewhat ephemeral.

Magazine articles

• If, like me, you were first exposed to computing in the era of 8-bit microcomputers like the TRS-80, Commodore Pet, and Apple II, the Classic Computer Magazine Archive (http://www.atarimagazines.com/) will be an exercise in nostalgia. It has the full text of all issues of Atari Magazine, STart, and Hi-Res, full text of several issues of Creative Computing (the first computer magazine I read regularly), and some articles from Compute! and Compute!'s Gazette, all with the permission of the publishers. Well, I think it's cool, anyway.