About RedLectern

What RedLectern is

A free site for two things: studying open university courses, and reading free books. There’s no charge to read, no account required to get started, and no display ads. How RedLectern is built explains where everything comes from and how it is checked.

Counts as of 2026-10-22

• 2,596 courses in the catalog, from MIT OpenCourseWare (2,592), The Open University (OpenLearn) (2) and TU Delft OpenCourseWare (2); 1,965 of them have a course page on RedLectern (3 in course order, 1,962 with the provider's materials by section) and 631 link to the course on the provider's site.
• 10,833 listings of free books on the Books page: 234 for books cited by MIT OpenCourseWare courses and 10,599 from RedLectern’s own list. 5,295 of them open in the reader here; the other 5,538 link to the free copy at its source.
• 5,277 book pages in the reader: 5,248 opened from those 5,295 listings (45 of them from more than one listing) and 29 alternate editions of another book.
• 1 Project Gutenberg index of works in the reader; it is not counted as a book page or a free copy.
• 17 books with human-narrated LibriVox audio, 14 of them highlighting the text as it’s read (the list).

Where the courses come from

Course materials come from MIT OpenCourseWare (2,592 courses), most under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license, plus 4 from other open providers (The Open University (OpenLearn) and TU Delft OpenCourseWare), each under its own license. The license and source are credited on every course page. RedLectern is independent of MIT and these other providers and is not endorsed by them; this is self-study, with no grades, certificates or credit.

Where the books come from

Every book hosted here comes from Project Gutenberg, whose volunteers digitize and proofread editions that are public domain in the United States. Before showing a book, a script removes Project Gutenberg’s own header and license text and formats the text for reading on RedLectern; the underlying words are the public-domain text, unchanged (if you find leftover header text, please report it). Every hosted book links back to its Project Gutenberg edition. The other 5,538 of the 10,833 listings on the Books page aren’t hosted here: they link out to the free copy on the site that offers it.

Where the audio comes from

The audio on our audiobook pages is a recording from LibriVox, read by LibriVox’s volunteer narrators from the same public-domain text. Each audio book’s page credits its narrator and links to the LibriVox recording. 17 books have it; the audiobooks list shows each one.

How quotes are verified

Every quote on RedLectern’s Quotes pages (verified word for word in the text) is checked by script, not chosen by eye: each one is re-read against the exact passage in that book’s reader page, at the same position, every time the site is built. A quote that no longer matches — because the text or its position changed — is dropped automatically and never shown. Every quote links to the exact passage it came from, so you can read it in context. Candidate lines are nominated by AI language-model agents searching quotation sites, and one is kept only if the script finds it in the book. No quote’s wording is a model’s: the quote text and its passage link both come straight from the book’s own reader page.

How to report an error

Report a problem with a course, a book or a source (a broken link, an incomplete copy, a wrong source or a content error): email corrections@redlectern.com with the page’s address and what you found.

Who runs RedLectern

RedLectern is a small, independent project, run under the name RedLectern.

Email: privacy@redlectern.com