Over 12,000 Free Arabic eBooks on NYU’s Arabic Collections Online for Your Reading Pleasure

It’s been almost a week of this self isolatory abyss and our list of prestigious (or frisky, it’s a safe space) material for all your horizon-brightening pleasures is now a lot longer than (hopefully) the time it’ll take to get out of here. After everything's said and done, there’s no actual pressure to have to turn this quarantining period into an intellectual factory (most of us are sat at home binging Gossip Girl) but truth be told, we keep coming across cool databases that tickle our intellectual fancy, like the NYU’s Arabic Collections Online (ACO), that we can’t help but share with you. So, as we keep expanding our list, we invite you to do the same.

The ACO is a publicly available digital library hosting over 12,000 books in Arabic, all of which are free to read. Its diverse range of authors and subjects, from literature to philosophy to music, is sourced from the richest of Arabic collections from some of the world’s and region’s most distinguished research libraries, like those of Princeton, Columbia, AUB, AUC and - obviously - NYU.

Other than to keep you in the cultural loop, the ACO project is meant to digitise and preserve important Arabic work that is in danger of being lost due to old age, fragility, or the general inaccessibility of being out-of-print, providing the world with easy and free access to a rich Arabic library collection, and filling the gap of an otherwise lack of readily attainable digital Arabic resources.