I had been looking for an affordable and free way to read Icelandic books ever since I started my Icelandic learning journey. However, whenever I went to Project Gutenberg there would almost never be any content for Icelandic. But then today I found bækur.is. It is an effort by the National and University Library of Iceland to digitize old Icelandic books. So it's like Iceland's own Project Gutenberg or the Internet Archive's Text Archive but funded by the national government.

There are several caveats though. First, as far as I had seen, none of the digitized books have an html or epub version. They do allow you to read the images of the books pages on their website or to download whole books as pdfs for you to read at your own leisure. Also, you cannot search by language or topic however you can search for keywords in the book titles, authors, and for some books even the full text. This textual version does not seem to be available publicly though, only as part of the search features within the book and for the website.

However, there are also several great findings. First, a general discovery. For some of the books you can even go into the immersive view and search for keywords within the digitized text itself. This is especially great in my second finding. This website has a digitized version of an English-Icelandic Dictionary by G.T. Zoega and it's searchable in the immersive view. I'm so excited because it brings all the benefits of a print dictionary since there are similar words sorted in order but in a digital form.

Anyway, I hope you have as much fun with baekur.is as I had finding it!