Designing your Own Books - Where to Find Free Pictures and Text to Use

If you're wanting to design your own mini books, you can make up your own cover and set of pages (my tutorial here has a template you can use/adapt if you like), and of course you can make your own text and /or illustrations, but you may be looking on the Internet for some you can use freely.

Here are some links to sites I've found useful.

You can always just do a search for 'Public Domain Images' (or text) for book covers or for the topic you're interested in.

If you're on Pinterest (I have a board with links to Mini Books free covers/downloads here). You can search for what you want, and you'll find heaps; just be aware that many will be for sale, not free; and also many I've found have low-quality images.

For complete book text , cover and illustrations and even sometimes images of pages (for old, out-of-copyright books):

Project Gutenberg has a huge range of titles and categories;

also try searching for titles of old books on 
Google Books (includes some out-of-copyright books)/

Here are the sites I've found useful to find pictures that are free to use (e.g. cat images, book cover images, flower fairies...):

The Public Domain Review

PublicDomainPictures.net

Rawpixel (filter for Public Domain) 

Pixabay - royalty-free images you can use anywhere

Unsplash.com free pictures, various categories

Library of Congress has free-to-use sets of images, and also some ebooks, though I haven't found their search function easy to use.

and PictureBoxBlue.com  has some lovely collections of public domain pictures that are already in topics and sets.

For patterned 'endpaper' pages, look on the above picture sites for textures/patterns.