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The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library. Its purposes include offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format. Founded in 1996 and located in San Francisco, the Archive has been receiving data donations from Alexa Internet and others. In late 1999, the organization started to grow to include more well-rounded collections. Now the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages in our collections, and provides specialized services for adaptive reading and information access for the blind and other persons with disabilities.

Link: http://www.archive.org/

As of the writing of this article the Internet Archive has archived over 1.5 billion webpages - a time machine that you can look at any site back through time and see how it has evolved. There are nearly 300,000 moving images that include old tv shows and movies. There are 81,000 concerts in the live music archive. You’ll find nearly 600,000 audio recordings that include audio books. And you’ll find nearly two and a half million text files. According to the site you can... “Download free books and texts. The Internet Archive Text Archive contains a wide range of fiction, popular books, children’s books, historical texts and academic books. This collection is open to the community for the contribution of any type of text, many licensed using Creative Commons licenses.” 

A warning to teachers. You’ll want to monitor student usage of this site, as some materials may be inappropriate for younger audiences.

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