You’ve got an ebook reader (or a laptop or netbook with ebook reading software) now you just need some free books to put it to good use. Read on as we show you the best places to score free books online. There are quite a few places where you can pay for books online such as,, and the —among many other options—but what about scoring free books? Let’s take a look at some of the more popular free book destinations online. Each entry includes information about the site and what kind of ebook formats the site natively supports. A few note worthy things before we continue. First things first, you’re going to need an ebook reader. This could be a physical ebook device like the, the, or a. ![]() ![]() Get started making an ebook with Blurb's ebook creator. Easily design and share an ebook for Amazon Kindle Fire ®, Apple iPad®, Android, and Mac or PC computers. Search the world's most comprehensive index of full-text books. It could also be your laptop, smart phone, or computer running ebook software—such as the Kindle or Nook software for PCs or a third party ebook reading software. Chances are that if you’re reading this article you’ve already got that part figured out; we just didn’t want anything to stand between you and your free books. Second, If you’re going to be converting between ebook formats (such as converting ePUB books to MOBI books for use on your Kindle) we highly recommend the robust and powerful open-source ebook management software —we can’t stress enough how awesome Calibre is for managing and converting your ebook collection. Finally, the following methods for finding free ebooks are all legal. We know as well as the next geek that anybody and their brother can fire up a BitTorrent client and download entire ebook libraries or simply hunt and peck in Google search results for PDF files; this roundup, however, is focused on legitimate channels for acquiring new reading material. Downloading these free books might make book publishers sad over their lost profits but they won’t send an armada of lawyers after you. Project Gutenberg is the grand daddy of free ebook web sites. Started by Michael Hart in the 1970s the original collection was a small assortment of books that Hart hand typed in order to digitize classic works of literature. Since then the project has grown enormously and now contains 33,000 books and documents in the public domain. You won’t find a larger or better organized collection of classics anywhere on the internet. All the books at Project Gutenberg are free, legal, and available as ePub, Kindle, HTML, and basic text documents. ManyBooks.net If you like the idea of Project Gutenberg—a massive index of public domain books—but you’re not a fan of their Spartan interface and text-only listings, then is for you. ManyBooks is essentially a Project Gutenberg mirror with some extras layered on top. Those extras include detailed entries for each book with summaries, cover art, book reviews, and books formatted in over 20 digital formats. If you’re looking for the Project Gutenberg experience with more of a modern digital bookstore feel and flair, ManyBooks.net is it. All the books are free and formats include LIT, LRF, ePUB, MOBI, PDF, and more. DailyLit takes a novel approach to ebooks. Rather than offer an entire book for instant download, they’ve essentially modernized the idea of the serialized novel. In decades past magazines and newspapers would print books, almost always popular fiction, in serial form breaking the book up into small segments. ![]() The publication’s readers were able to enjoy the book and the author was paid a lump sum by the publication. DailyLit takes that model and applies it to email and RSS. You pick out a book, they send you a chunk every day, and you read and enjoy it with a small bit of advertising attached. They solve two dilemmas which this arrangement: how to get commercial books in front of people for free and how to fit reading into a busy schedule. It’s not a perfect solution for everyone but the books are free and the topics diverse. DailyLit currently features a selection of around a thousand books. FeedBooks has a regular ebook storefront, but the part we’re interested in is and. Between the two they have thousands of novels, short stories, and poetry collections. It is one of the smaller collections in our roundup but we’re not going to complain—free but small is still free. All FeedBooks ebooks are in ePUB format. Amazon’s Free and Discounted Section You may be wondering why Amazon, given its size, wasn’t at the top of the list. The hassle factor of using Amazon’s services—unless you’re a Kindle owner or Kindle software user—is quite high. None the less you can score some free books of both and. Amazon’s store has over 15,000 public domain books and hundreds of promotional books at any given time. To use the free books from Amazon you’ll need to send them either to your Kindle or to your Kindle software on your computer, Android phone, or other device. If you’re trying to rip them to another format you’ll need to use the software on a computer so you can easily access the files. Send the books to your Kindle for PC account, open the folder with your books, and dump them into Calibre. Public domain and completely free books are not encrypted and you can easily use Calibre to convert them to other formats. Books which are not public domain but are temporarily free as a promotion are still encrypted and cannot be converted in Calibre. Still, if you really want to read a book that’s temporarily free in the Amazon Kindle bookstore, it might be worth loading the Kindle software on your computer or phone—this is one of the few methods for legally getting non-public-domain books for free-as-in-beer. Note: The and the store both have similar free section, though not as large as Amazon’s. Armed with the above links and tips you’ll never be short on reading material again. Have a source for free and legal books to share? Let’s hear about it in the comments. Books aren't dead. They're just getting digitized, like everything else. While there's a real charm to owning a stack of bound paper that you can fold the corners of, underline, and read without staring at a screen, ebooks are far more convenient. Your backpack can hold maybe four or five books, but one e-reader or tablet can hold thousands of titles. Plus, e-readers allow you to search text, share the saucy bits, and read at night without a light. You can publish your own ebook relatively easily. Any text you find on the web that you'd rather read on your Kindle? Port it over. And, if you've got the time, you can turn your favorite antiquated paper book into an ebook too. It's just going to take a lot of page turning—and scanning. So whether you're ready to share the manuscript that's been sitting in a folder on your desktop for years, or you'd like digitize an old paper copy of Cervantes, here's our guide to creating a digital copy of just about any book. Pick a Format There are a handful of popular formats that will work with just about any e-reader, but you'll have to base your final decision on whether the book is just for you, or for a wider audience. If you'd rather not put your book in Amazon's store, but you'd still like to make a Kindle- or iPad-readable ebook that you can distribute on some other website, try using a service like. The ebook creation software offers many options to lay out your book however you like. Also note that all e-readers, including Kindles, can read PDF files. An easy path to digital publishing is to just output your book as a PDF, then host the file on the web. This is the easiest publishing method if you're digitizing an old book. Depending on the e-reader being used, PDF files may not be searchable, and some of the more advanced features of the e-reader may not be available. You can give those PDFs extra power by converting them into one of the ebook-native formats like the Kindle's azw3. The free software app called Calibre can to and from just about any format. The Scan Plan If you penned your new bestseller on a computer, publishing it as an ebook is easy. But if you're working from a real paper book—something hand-made, something with no digital version—you're going to have to scan it. The cheap but tedious option is to flip each page and use a traditional flat scanner to capture each page. It's difficult to get a clean scan, though, and you'll likely lose some words to the shadow of the book's spine. The coolest way to digitize an old page-turner is to use a book scanner with a flexible cradle. A can cost upwards of $10,000, so unless you have a library of out-of-print rarities, you might want to see if there's a book scanner available at your local library. There are also services like and that have made the hardware investment and will digitize your book for a fee (usually under $15 per book). If you're the DIY type, you can try building your own book scanner. There's a large and active of ebook enthusiasts who are building their own scanners. It could be fun! Share It—Or Don't Now that you have a digital version of your book, how are you going to distribute it? You could sell your book, give it away for free, or keep it all to yourself. If you want to sell it, your best options for the widest distribution are Amazon's Kindle Marketplace or Apple's iBookstore. Both stores lay out clear instructions for how to work with them to distribute your masterpiece. Both also let you give it away for free. If you'd rather keep things indie, has a publishing tool (the company also makes awesome e-readers), and is a platform that many independent authors use. Here's of alternative booksellers. Just trying to share a cool first edition copy of your favorite old text with a niche crew? Start with a PDF, then convert it to a few different formats so each person can have the format that works best for them. Congrats on your new ebook! And do remember not to lick your finger to turn the page on your Kindle. It doesn't quite work like that anymore.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
March 2018
Categories |