• The Digital Library of India: The Digital Library of India (DLI) has scanned and preserved over 250,000 books in many languages, of which around 13,000 are in Sanskrit. This project is coodinated by the IISc and has over 20 partner centers across different specialties. Read an article Digital Libraries in India for some details of the project. The Government of India has spent a large amount of resources in scanning and preserving valuable books through this project. The principal collections are housed at the IISc, Bangalore and at the IIIT, Hyderabad. You can either download books directly as mentioned below or you can read them page by page in a browser. To read books in a browser, you should download the AlternaTIFF plugin on Windows computers Given below are the main DLI collections. Each houses a different set of books. You can find lists of books in each collection and catalogs of the current availability of scans of each book, in the links next to each collection.
  • There are two servers at DLI, IISC, Bangalore, the http://www.new.dli.ernet.in/ and http://www.new1.dli.ernet.in/. (new most probably getting transferred to new1 with cleaner Unicode titles. (The server connection is slow.) For new.dli : Catalog listing with the scan availability of Sanskrit books, another list of Sanskrit books , a list of Marathi books)

  • DLI collection at IIIT, Hyderabad: The site http://dli.iiit.ac.in is permanently down due to ministery terminating the ERNET connection to servers. The data is in planning stage to be moved to IISc server or perhaps to MCIT library Consortium locations. Here are the older Catalog listing with the scan availability of Sanskrit books, another list of Sanskrit books, a list of Marathi books for reference p[urpose.

  • Many of the books at CDAC, Noida are available in PDF format at Partner Collection from IISc DLI server. There are over 900 books, mostly in the category of English literature (Nov, 2010).
  • The new uploads to IISc-DLI are listed under recent collection.

  • The methodology adopted in the acquisition, presentation, and corrective catalogs is presented in many journals papers, Content Development for Digital Library of India and Digitizing a Million Books: Challenges for Documents Analysis, The Digital Library of India Project: Process, Policies and Architecture.

  • The digital library at Osmania University, Hyderabad at http://oudl.osmania.ac.in/ hosts thousands of directly downloadable PDF files of many of the books at DLI. See a long list of Sanskrit and Marathi books (Jan 2012).

  • The Universal Library at Pittsburgh, USA http://www.ulib.org/

• The Internet Archive houses scanned books as well as music, audiovisual and web content. The books are available in different formats such as PDF, B&W PDF, text, djvu etc. (a list of Sanskrit books, a list of Marathi books).

• Google Books (a list of Sanskrit books, a list of Marathi books). All books are in PDF format. Use full view texts in your search options.

• The National Mission for Manuscripts namami.org seeks to unearth and preserve the vast manuscript wealth of India. The department publishes a newsletter. Although there are no scanned books available, the details of the process and efforts taken in preservation of documents are informative.

• A Collection of Full-Text Books on South Asia at Columbia University. It containts plain text English translations and not scanned Sanskrit books like the repositories listed above.

• Archaeological Survey of India asi.nic.in has made available over two thousand scanned books in PDF format and is set to more than ten thousands. These are digitized at Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA). The digital library is at http://www.ignca.nic.in/ with specific search capability. See a list of books with Sanskrit word search. The Sanskrit book list is given here (asisanskritpdfs) with title and PDF links. A similar list covering the available catalog is also prepared here (asiallpdfs) for convenience (Sept 2010). All the available and planned books are listed on their search site or a consolidated mirror catalog.

• E-books at Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan, New Delhi. Some of these are uploaded on archive.org as a backup RSS Packaged.

• In order to centralize some of the different personal collections made over the years, new material written or created by others and some material from this site, we have started The Free Indological Collection" at archive.org. This collection also makes materials from some of the digital repositories that are hard to access, easier to access, and also preserves defunct repositories. It also provides backup access for some of the books. Please see the archive.org TFIC homepage as well as our project page TFIC project page. Thousands of books are being made available at the TFIC collection. Please use the "list of titles" at archive.org TFIC homepage. You are also invited to contribute books not in our collection. Please send an email to dli.downloader[[@]yahoo.com.

• The Library System, University of Delhi has Digital Library with many PDF files. See some cataloged at main, and thinned.

• For reference, a set of Guidelines for digitization_of manuscripts (National Libraries of India) are formulated. The UNESCO has given similar but more detailed guidelines at Digitization of Old Books, Manuscripts, and Other Documents, The Format for Storage of Metadata, and Method.

• A list of Collection of links to electronic libraries.

Software to obtain scanned books:

• DLI Downloader 0.23: The DLI Downloader is an easy to use, comprehensive software solution to download books or selected pages from the DLI at high speeds. It is a one-click install and provides one-click downloads from both DLI sites. The DLI Downloader includes a lot of fault tolerance and network optimization features to provide fast and reliable downloads. You can resume broken downloads any time, as well as preview pages before downloading. It also comes with catalogs listing the availability of scans of books at the two DLI sites, so that you can search for books quickly. The catalogs make hundreds of corrections to the transliteration, typo, broken links and other errors in the DLI collections. The DLI Downloader 0.23 is a completely free, small and fast tool from Prabhu of PR Labs and runs on all Windows platforms such as Windows XP, Vista, Server and Windows 7. The DLI Downloader can also be downloaded from locations 1 and 2 . No other downloads are necessary. (DLID 0.1 users must install DLID 0.23 afresh.) See also its announcements and an FAQ on blogspot and wordpress.

• Script 1 (Unix/Linux/OS X), Commercial 1 on metaproducts.com.

• DLI-viewer and downloader by Ajit Krishnan http://www.aupasana.com/software. The utility has a search capability, direct linking, PDF file creation and other features. It adds a page link as footer on each page.

• Use an "Addon" batchdownload for firefox to download books.

• ABS DLI Downloader V2.2 by Alok B. Shukla (for his name ABS). The file version 2.2 (1.067 Mb), marked April 2012, is shared at 4shared.com which requires registration. (If you do not want to register, download the file from absdlidownloaderv2.2.rar, renamed and relinked from convenience. Please use your own discretion.) Similar to above DLIDownloader by Prabhu, this also needs only the barcode of the bOok. Not all books are linked from here so check the DLI and compare. Alok has titled it as "Where Knowledge is Free" from a poem by Ravindranath Tagore.

Personal collections:

• The Sanskrit E-Books site at http://sanskritebooks.org has a list of free downloadable Sanskrit ebooks posted at various sites such as scribd, mediafire, ibiblio.org, esnips, archive.org et cetera.

• Ajit Krishnan's DLI downloads grouped in different categories (veda (adhyatmika), advaita, kalpa, vyakaranam, sahitya, natakam, upanyasam, amara kosha, champu, mahakavyam, darshana, stotra.)

• Adisesh Iyyengar's Shared Files on Mediafire. The total number of files is over 8600. They are categorized (2009) as below. A title search is also allowed. Explore.
  
  • 01.Vedic Religion (or) Srivaishnava | 251 Folders, 6496 Files, Tags: Veda, Srivaishnava, Vadakalai, Vedanta Desikan, Ramanuja
  • 02.Ebooks Created 04/23/2009 | 42 Folders, 649 Files
  • 03.Hinduism Created 02/12/2009 | 5 Folders, 101 Files, Hinduism doctrines, scientific proofs, etc.
  • 04.Music Created 11/12/2009 | 59 Folders, 650 Files Tags: Carnatic Music, Devotional Songs, Sankeerthanas
  • 05.Proofs of Rebirth Created 04/23/2009 | 0 Folders, 53 Files
  • 06.Miscellaneous Created 03/17/2009 | 9 Folders, 661 Files

• Atman's e-books kept on mediafire.

• Collection at ambaa.org (see files larger than 1Mb).

• Subbu's Audio files.

• Digital Library at Muktabodha Indological Research Institute has a large collection of encoded as well as scanned books.

• Sri Vaidyanatha Deekshitiya Smrti Muktaphalam and at 2.

• Ancient Indian mathematics and astronomy (Ganita and Jyotish) and Sanskrit Grammar (Vyakarana) texts are available at Joseph Leichter's wilbourhall.org site. Specifically Aryabhatiya, Bhaskaracarya's Siddhanta Siromani, Brahmagupta's Brahma-Sphuta-Siddhanta, Jagannatha Samrat's Rekhaganita, Minaraja'a Vrddhayavanjataka, Panini- Kashika, Mahabhashya, Surya Siddhanta, Varahamihira's Pancasiddhantika, Brihat Samhita, Brhat Jataka et cetera.

• Categorized links to books from various sources at The Portal to Ancient India

• A number of rare and historical Sanskrit dictionaries are provided in a convenient single volume format here. These include Sanskrit-French, English-Sanskrit and Sanskrit-German (Cappeller, Petersburger Worterbuch Grosses (PWG), Petersburger Worterbuch kleines (pwg)) dictionaries apart from Monier Williams, Wilson, Cappeller and Macdonel Sanskrit-English dictionaries. A smaller, but less legible scan of Monier Williams' dictionary is provided here. The ISKCON version of the Srimad Bhagavatam with an English translation by Srila Prabhupada and his disciples, is included here. Lastly, the 22 volumes of the Sacred Books of the East series that pertain to Hindu scriptures and the general index are provided here. In all, over 70,000 pages of text are provided in this collection!

• See a comprehensive list of scanned books at scribd under eko.aham and marAThI mandaL carefully prepared by Vishwas Bhide.

• Documents scanned and uploaded by Shri Hemant Moghe of Baroda.

• Digital library at agamaacademy.org. The texts AgamA include kAmika, kiraNa, pUrva karaNa, uttara karaNa, makuTa, suprabheda, vIra, vatUla, yogaja, and many vidhI.

• ISKCON's multimedia portal at ebooks.iskcondesiretree.info hosts many scanned or individually prepared PDF files related to Krishna Consciousness. Also visit kunjeshwari.com for additional downloadable books in different languages.

• Shodh Ganga, a reservoir of Indian theses, which include many papers dealing with Sanskrit. http://shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in.

• A Buddhist library site http://lirs.ru/lib has many downloadable books. It is a Russian site but one can easily follow the English part for accesing the books. It has very unique way of linking the books. In google search bar type, pdf site:lirs.ru/lib OR pdf site:http://dharma.org.ru/ OR djvu site:http://dharma.org.ru/ to get links to the set of files.

• Posted books/PDF/audio files on 4shared.com with search on the word Sanskrit. Many of these are reposted copies of items online elsewhere

• Asian Classics Input Project (ACIP) is busy entering many Buddhist and Yoga related books.

• Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh RSS books 1 2.

• Ancient Indian Astrology site ancientindianastrology.com has a comprehensive digital library of Jyotish and Indology related books and various links.

• Books related to speeches of Osho/Rajneesh are available at http://www.osho.com/library. Also http://www.oshoworld.com has quite a few media files providing teachings of the great teacher. The Hindi discourse (videos) are available at http://www.youtube.com/user/OSHOHindi.

• See the well-formatted 108 PDF ebooks at ahobilavalli.org, a source of information on Vishishtadvaita. The group is planning for 108 more books under the series Ahobilavalli Grantha Maalaa. See also srihayagrivan.org, links, and http://prapatti.com/ (with audio files prepared by Sunder Kidambi.)

• http://cincinnatitemple.com/articlesRel.html hosts many articles related to Hindu practices and thoughts.

• Books on Yogavasishtha and Vedanta on Scribd posted by Jnaanaananda.

• The site of http://jagadgururambhadracharya.org includes compositions of Shri Rambhadracharya, especially Unicode Sanskrit texts of the epic Sribhargavaraghaviyam, the epic Gitaramayanam, and the duutakaavya Bhrngadutam. Scanned PDFs include Ajadacandrasekharacaritam, Srigangamahimnastotram, Srisarayulahari, Srisitaramasuprabhatam, Srisitasudhanidhin (Excerpts).

• Scanned Tantra texts in Dr. Bali's collection at http://www.scribd.com/aghorinath/shelf.

• Scanned books in Arun Upadhyay's collection.

• Spiritual Media books at http://www.dadabhagwan.org in English \, Gujarati, and Hindi built from question answer sessions of Dada Bhagwan (Ambalal Muljibhai Patel) who established Akram Vignan - the science of Self Realization.

• Dwaita Library has independently scanned books of various authors.

• Books written by V. D. Savarkar, mostly in Marathi, are available at http://www.savarkarsmarak.com/ and bookganga.com.

• The books written by Swami Raksukhadas are available for download, see English and Hindi, and other languages sections. Most of these are quality publications from Geetapress, Gorakhpur, contact for hard copy book sales.

• Bhaktivedanta Research Centre holds many Vaishnava literature manuscripts.

If you have already downloaded books, especially Sanskrit/Marathi ones, and would like to offer them for public use, please send a note with links or mode of transfer to sanskrit@cheerful.com.