Books & archives
British Library
bl.uk
Books & archivesfree
Digitised manuscripts, maps, and historical newspapers from the UK's national library. Many scans download as PDFs for primary-source work.
As the UK's national library, it holds digitized manuscripts, maps, and historical newspapers with real provenance behind them, which matters for a notebook doing primary-source work on British or colonial history. Many items download as PDFs directly. Coverage naturally skews toward British and Commonwealth material, so it fits that history better than other regions.
Import into Gemini Notebook
- 1Copy the link above (or a specific page from the site).
- 2In your notebook, click Add source → Website.
- 3Paste the link and confirm — several links can be pasted at once, one per line.
For public-domain books, download the Plain Text file and upload it — the 500,000-words-per-source limit fits most novels whole. ePub uploads are supported too.
More books & archives sources
- Project Gutenberg75,000+ public-domain books. Grab the Plain Text UTF-8 edition for the cleanest import.
- Internet ArchiveBooks, historical documents, magazines and archived websites — much of it downloadable as text or PDF.
- Standard EbooksCarefully typeset public-domain ePubs — a cleaner starting point than raw scans for literature notebooks.
- WikisourceTranscribed historical texts, speeches and primary documents, page-linked and citable.
- Open LibraryCatalog and lending arm of the Internet Archive — useful for finding which editions exist and where.
- Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)Peer-reviewed open-access academic books, most downloadable as PDFs — a legal way to get whole scholarly monographs into a notebook.
- HathiTrust Digital LibraryMillions of digitized library volumes; public-domain titles are downloadable as full PDFs — a deep well for historical primary texts.
- OAPEN LibraryThousands of open-access academic books, strongest in humanities and social sciences. Full PDFs download freely and upload straight into a notebook.
- Open Research LibraryOne search box across open-access scholarly books from many publishers. Read online or grab PDFs to upload as notebook sources.
- WikipediaQuick background on almost any topic. Paste article URLs as Website sources for context, then chase the footnotes for primary material worth importing.