Free e-books
This guide covers where and how to obtain free e-books of all kinds. This subject comes up often on TeleRead, and we try to pass on new freebies when we hear about them. But keeping up with everything is not easy; nor is keeping track of new public domain titles and new editions of public domain titles, not to mention Project Gutenberg and out-of-print books being released as free ebooks.
So from time to time TeleRead will post an updated list of e-book freebies, giving more emphasis to self-publishers, fiction writers and living writers. You can also see a list of blog posts slugged free e-books, and if you own a Kindle, you can might enjoy our tips for obtaining free books not just from public domain sites but also commercial titles the Kindle store itself.
In an age of too many books (warning: PDF), where the number of English-language fiction titles have doubled in 5 years, coming up with a comprehensive list seems futile.
At best, any compilation of free e-books will reflect the idiosyncratic tastes of whoever compiled the list, and people have questions about whether something as important as literature should be given away for free. There is also the question of what is an e-book (i.e. what format), whether a website or flash interface can serve as a book and whether to list titles available only in a certain format.
For now, we’ll leave aside these questions and simply make notes when appropriate.
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Free E-book blogs
- Finding Free Ebooks Online (RSS) is a great blog of recent free ebooks, with an emphasis on new titles. Some titles mentioned on this blog are free only for a limited time, so be careful. The blogger (whose first name is Christine) also publishes a conventional book review blog . One nice thing is that the posts contain specific information about format and web presentation.
- Ebooks Just published (New Release RSS) is Mark Gladding’s wonderful blog which allows indie authors to announce their recent works. Although most of the new releases are available for reasonable prices (usually less than $5), this blog has a separate category for free ebook titles
- On the U. Penn Women Writes site there is a listing of the latest releases around the Net (alas, no rss). Mainly academic & public domain titles.
- Online Novels is Susan Crealock’s site with names, links, covers and descriptions of the books. Categorized by genre. Susan says she updates it daily.
Free e-book distribution sites
- Mobileread’s Ebook uploads is the best place for well-formatted ebooks in .prc, .lrf and .pdf. Generally, the formatting is wonderful, and uploaders often provide updates in case of mistakes/problems. Despite the growing community of uploaders, the selection is still somewhat scanty (except the most well-known titles). Still, good to check here first. Their reader recommendation forum contains lots of free titles. Their Deals & Freebies forum let people give information about recent freebies. Also, on their wiki the MR free ebooks page contains many of the same links listed here.
- Project Gutenberg search pdb, html, txt. The later additions have well-formatted single html versions with graphics. As long as you can do HTML to ebook conversions, this remains the most complete source.
- Feedbooks free, creative commons and public domain classics available in well-formatted forms (PDF, Mobipocket, LRF). Here’s their list of recent books (with RSS feed),user-created lists,
- American Verse Project–lots of well-formatted poetry books. You can view in a single HTML page for easy conversion to pdf/prc, lrf, etc.
- Boing Boing’s Book Section contains a lot of free titles. Sci Fi writer Cory Doctorow has been at the forefront of the free book movement.
- Manybooks.net: multiple formats, all free. Significantly, the catalog contains a list of RSS feeds by category to make it easier to keep track of what’s been added recently. RSS feeds include: Creative Commons, Sci fi, Short Stories,
- Wowio contains ad-supported PDF ebooks. Includes lots of comic titles and alternative press. Registration is required.
- Baen Free Library contains lots of sci fi titles by about 30 authors. They were one of the first to offer free titles.
- Tony Kline’s translation of classical texts. This one-man site consists of Kline’s translations of many famous works, plus downloads in HTML, PDF and .DOC. Also some PD British lit and original poetry by Kline himself. Contains translations from Latin, Greek, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Russian. Spanish. This site utterly astonishes me!
- List of various sources of free ebooks and online books, at Techsupportalert. Lots of overlap with stuff on this list.
- Creative Commons Wiki contains links to CC-licensed books/ebooks. Lot of titles are also found on mobileread, manybooks, etc..
- Book Glutton provides a way for many people to annotate PD books published on the web. (Read more). The RSS feed contains recent uploads, including several by Book Glutton members.
- Online Prize-winning books from the 1920’s and 1930’s, HTML only. Collected by University of Pennsylvania.
- Celebration of Women Writers has lots of digitalized books (rendered as html with images). Here’s an index by author and a listing of the latest releases (alas, no rss but a blog about recent releases)
- Southern DocSouth literary collection. Interesting collection of public domain literary and history documents from the Southern part of USA. Badly organized, but markup is both TEI and HTML, plus images. Very nice!
- Project Gutenberg Australia (where copyright laws are Date of Death Plus Fifty Years). See their Not-for-US ebook list.
- Starry’s Free Online Novels contains about 25 free novels. An eclectic mix, with a lot of sci fi.
- Book View Cafe is a consortium of over twenty professional authors with extensive publishing credits in the print world. Every day, new content available nowhere else will be served up on Book View Cafe: short stories, flash fiction, poetry, episodes of serialized novels, and maybe even a podcast now and then.
Free children’s literature e-Ebooks. There’s a lot of good free children’s books out there on web pages, just not in ebook formats. Usually you have to do your own conversions.
- Children’s Literature Bookshelf (PG) lists many of the best works from the Gutenberg collection.
- University of Pennsylvania’s Digital Library has digitalized 15 or so Newberry Award winners and posted the HTML.
- MobileRead has a small amount of children’s ebooks in Mobipocket, epub, and Sony Reader (with lots of overlap).
- International Children’s Digital Library has lots of online titles, but are probably impossible to convert to ebooks. Books for kids tend to rely on unusual layout and design, and ebooks fail miserably at that.
Sample sites. Almost all ebook sites contain free chapters/free samples of their ebook offerings. Generally, there is no need to list them here. But these are worth looking at:
- Daily Lit Book Sampler. Sends out 5 minute chunk of books via email or RSS feed. Public domain is free, and so are introductory chapters, then you have to pay.
- Smashwords is a commercial ebook distributor for indie authors, but a surprising percentage of titles are either free or pay-what-you-want. At the moment, no separate feed for free titles.
E-book conversion tools for those want to convert existing content themselves
- Calibre is the hot free tool of the moment. It converts things to epub format and is mainly for Sony Reader, although recently it supports Cybook. (Read the manual). Most notably, it contains lots of prepackaged recipes for downloading famous publications (New Yorker, New York Review of Books, Economist, etc) as well as special interest RSS feeds (XKCD). Be forewarned: the lead developer has been fixing lots of bugs and updating the software frequently, so you’ll be downloading updates every week or so. (Read the Calibre help forums)
- Ecub is a free tool that lets you import HTML/XHTML files and spit out EPUB and Mobipocket books. This tool is still fairly new.
Promote your own free e-book
Authors looking for ways to promote their own free ebooks should take a look at the sites listed above, especially the 2 Free Ebook Blogs listed at the top. Ebooks Just Published has an Author page which explains how to submit your own ebook announcement to the blog.
