About
Authors Directory answers one question well: what did this author write, and in what order? Every author page lists their books by publication date, groups the series in reading order, and suggests where to start. It covers 9,477 authors and 1,254 series, and 14,966 classics you can read free.
The site began in the early web as the Classical Authors Directory, an index of writers and their online texts that schools, libraries and readers linked to for years. This edition rebuilds it and widens it to writers publishing today.
How the book lists are made
Book lists are assembled from several open catalogues rather than typed by hand, then cleaned up: box sets, study guides and translated editions are filtered out, alternate titles are merged (a book published as The Visitor in one country and Running Blind in another is one entry), and series order follows the published numbering.
Ratings and reader counts come from Open Library members, so they show what people are reading rather than a critic's opinion. Each page carries the date its data was last rebuilt.
Something wrong or missing? Book data changes constantly, and these pages are only as good as the catalogues behind them. Corrections made at Open Library or Wikidata flow into this site on the next rebuild.
Sources and credits
- Free book texts, summaries and reading levels: Project Gutenberg. These are public domain in the United States; check the copyright laws of your own country before downloading.
- Book lists, editions, covers, page counts and ratings: Open Library.
- Author facts, series and adaptations: Wikidata.
- Biographies: Wikipedia, under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.
- Author photographs: Wikimedia Commons, where each image page lists its licence.
Buy links point to booksellers' own search results. Books you can read free are always marked as free, and those links go straight to Project Gutenberg.