Free Ebooks

Updated: 10 February 2011

Search Engines and Lists

• eReaderIQ – Tracks price drops on the Kindle store, or you can enter a specific Kindle title and the system will alert you if the price changes.
• “Best Places to Get Free Books – The Ultimate Guide” – Includes lots of links to genre collections and real-world book swapping sites as well.
• Digital Book Index – Searches for free and paid versions of ebooks.

General Collections

• Project Gutenberg – The biggest source of public domain titles, in multiple formats. Its Magic Catalog is a file you can store on your Kindle to browse for books.
• ManyBooks – Nearly 30,000 English language titles, as well as books in dozens of other languages.
• Foner Books – A hand-selected list of free classics on the Amazon Kindle store.
• Google ebookstore – Perform a search, then on the results page select the “free only” filter to see all public domain and otherwise free titles.
• Internet Archive – It can be a bit of a chore to slog through the unfriendly interface, but you can find lots of public domain material here in multiple formats.
• Open Library – The goal of this project from the Internet Archive is to catalog every known book. If an e-version exists, it will usually be listed.
• Feedbooks – A good collection of public domain titles. If you’re using a Kindle or mobile device, try the mobile version of their site.
• Bookyards

Lending Websites

Some readers gather online to swap ebooks via the lend-once feature offered by Amazon and Barnes & Noble. For both retailers, lending can only be done once, the loan lasts 14 days, and is enabled on a title by title basis at the publisher’s discretion. At present lending only works in the U.S., largely due to rights issues in other regions.

Non-English Language

• Ebooks libres et gratuits – French language classics.

Sci-Fi and Fantasy

• Baen Free Library
• Tor Books – Offers lots of free short fiction, plus the occasional longer work.

Miscellaneous

• TEXTFILES – Archive of content posted to Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) in the mid-1980s. Includes some fiction, but the real value is buried in all the other, user-generated categories.

Tech and Computer Books

• FreeTechBooks
• Realtime Nexus Digital Library
• IT Discover

Magazines, Trade Pubs, Business

• TradePub
• Asiaing

Audiobooks

• LibriVox
• Podiobooks – Serialized audiobooks.
• Well Told Tales – Sci-fi, horror and pulp stories.
• The Drabblecast – Sci-fi, fantasy and horror short fiction.

Communities

These aren’t places to find free books, but rather communities you can join to talk to other readers and find recommendations.

• Goodreads
• LibraryThing

(Illustration based off a photo by ktheory)