So you bought something nice, but now you have no money for eBooks… or maybe you hate DRM and don’t feel right about buying a paperback and then torrenting a digital copy. Well, there’s lots of help out there.
I don’t remember all of the free eBook sites I’ve bumped into and bookmarked over the years, but here are the ones I can remember right now:
- manybooks.net – Free eBooks for your PDA, iPod, or eBook Reader
(The collections page looks nice) - Project Gutenberg (For stuff that’s still copyrighted in the US, and for non-english works, also check the list of affiliated projects at Wikipedia)
- The text section of The Internet Archive
- Wikibooks (A Wikipedia sister site)
- The Works of Howard Phillips Lovecraft
- WOWIO (More free eBooks for things like the Sony Reader)
And last, but certainly not least, don’t forget about Wikipedia: List of digital library projects. Enjoy them and let me know about any others you find. 🙂
Resources for the eBook lover by Stephan Sokolow is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
The Baen Free Library is worth mentioning too, as is the Baen EBook setup in general. All books are available in a number on non-DRM-infested formats including HTML and plain text. The prices are reasonable, usually less than the price of a hardcopy. And lastly, Baen has made a number of their books freely available, either via the website or with the CDs bundled with their books, figuring that people will read it online and then be inspired to either buy the hardcopy or buy further ones in the series.
And while there are currently no free copies, I highly recommend the Kencyrath Chronicles, PC Hodgell’s fantasy series. Excellent books, and people buying the EBook might result in Baen also publishing hardcopies (Hodgell’s former publisher, Meisha Merlin, went bankrupt and Baen offered to pick her up, even if it’s just as an EBook initially).
Thanks. I knew I was forgetting *something*.
As a side-note, I’ll probably switch this over to a List_of_* page on my main site when I find the time. It makes things easier to keep track of.