• 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. 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 or the DLI's custom plugin on Linux 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.
  • DLI collection at the IISc, Bangalore: Catalog listing the scan availability of Sanskrit books, another list of Sanskrit books , a list of Marathi books)
  • DLI collection at IIIT, Hyderabad: Catalog listing the scan availability of Sanskrit books, another list of Sanskrit books, a list of Marathi books
  • 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.

• 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.

Software to obtain scanned books:

• DLI Downloader 0.2: 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 0.2 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 0.2 afresh.)

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

Personal collections:

• Shankara's The Sanskrit E-Books site has a list of free downloadable Sanskrit ebooks posted at various sites such as scribd, mediafire, ibiblio.org, esnips, archive.org et cetera. This page lists all available downloads. Here is a direct download link hosted by a data storage site. Additional Gita files.

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

• Atman's e-books.

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

• Subbu's documents and Audio/Video including 18 Sanskrit Sambhashana mp4 files and 35 audio files of discourses on "Devimahatmyam in Malayalam by Girishkumar.

• 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 link page on megaupload holds with 4+ GB total of 10+ scanned Sanskrit dictionaries. The smaller Monier Williams' dictionary scans are posted separately. In addition, Sacred Books of East are linked on mediafire links. The ISCON Bhagvatam with Translation is grouped together on megaupload. While the files are themselves protected and tested virus free, in general, please exercise caution while dealing with such free sites.

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.

Some books from the DLI that are also available on this site: ...