Here is my small selection of royalty-free books, images, videos and sounds. I’ve only put the ones I think are the best, but there are plenty more.
Even if it’s “free” and free, don’t forget to credit the authors, it’s the minimum you can do to thank them.
Royalty-free book banks
- Project Gutenberg : Project Gutenberg offers more than 54,000 free eBooks: choose from free ePub, Kindle, download or online reading formats.
- Open Library: the initiative of Internet Archive to build an open and editable library catalog.
Royalty-free image banks
Image banks are the most common on the Internet. Search on an engine and you will find many of them. Here are nevertheless the two best in my opinion:
- Unsplash: Tons of beautiful pictures, in a lot of categories. A must.
- Pixabay: Quite a lot of business pictures, so a good free alternative to Shutterstock.
- Visual Hunt: another very good site
- CC search: the meta-engine of the Creative Commons organization. You can find everything including a lot of amateur photos, so it’s necessarily less quality than other professional banks (but more natural maybe).
Royalty-free video banks
- Pexels Video: rather short background videos, not bad for site animations, less maybe for montages.
- Pixabay Videos: a bit of everything about Pixabay, including sequences that can be used for editing. There is some very good and some less good stuff.
Royalty free soundbanks
- La Sonothèque: so here it’s really sound effects (like a refrigerator door opening and closing) for montages.
- Free Music Archive
- At the end of the line
Royalty-free icon banks
All my resources available here.