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About us
Al-Warraq is an open Arabic digital library. It indexes books that have left copyright and leads readers to their free, legal copies at the original sources.
Who we are
The library is named after the warraqin, the copyists and booksellers of Abbasid Baghdad whose market was a meeting place for scholars and readers. In their footsteps, we want every reader to reach free books easily, from a phone or a computer, with no subscription and no sign-up.
Al-Warraq Library is an independent project founded and run by Ali Abbas Taher, who chooses its books and oversees its introductions and articles.
Our mission
To gather humanity's free heritage in one place, in plain Arabic and English: books you can search by title or author, sorted into clear categories, with their covers and a direct link to read them in full, and, for the best-known books, an introduction written by the library itself to help you choose.
What you will find
- 1,130,372 public-domain books in 97 languages, from Project Gutenberg, HathiTrust, Open Library and the Internet Archive.
- Our own introductions to 1,184 of the best-known books: what each book is about, who wrote it, why it is still read, and which edition or translation the library points to, with more added all the time. Beside them, articles in Arabic: reading guides, introductions to writers and chapters from the history of the Arabic book.
- Diwan of the Arabs: 41,183 poems by the great Arab poets, from pre-Islamic times to the modern era, from Arabic Wikisource.
- 411,702 authors and 21 categories, from novels and poetry to history, philosophy and medicine.
- 67,647 modern Arabic books (novels, self-development and more): those Safahat (Hindawi Foundation) publishes free with their owners' permission are read in full there; for books under copyright we show the catalogue record and link to their Open Library page.
- The research desk: free-to-read medical and engineering papers, found through OpenAlex.
How it works
We do not host or sell book files. We gather catalogue data from open sources, sort and categorise it, translate the titles of famous books and the names of their authors, write original introductions to the best-known ones, and send you to the reading page at the original source. Reading is completely free.
Our principles
- Always free for readers: no accounts, no subscriptions.
- Privacy first: our statistics are anonymous, as the privacy policy explains.
- Respect for copyright: we never show the text of a book under copyright, only its catalogue record and a link to a legal source that shows it; we review every report and remove a link if it infringes.
Get in touch
Your suggestions shape the library. If a book is missing or something is wrong, write to us.