Find Free eBooks
eBooks are a great way to read books on the go, without having to find space for them. Whether you own an e-reader or are just curious about downloading books online, read the steps below to learn how to find eBooks for free.
Contents
Steps
Public Sites
- Get public domain books from Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg is a non-profit organization that provides free downloads of books whose copyrights have expired. It is the first and oldest eBook repository on the Internet, and contains thousands of classic books in nearly every genre. Simply visit the website and use the search bar in the upper left to browse by title or author.
- Project Gutenberg provides eBooks in many different formats, ranging from HTML and plain text to EPUB and Kindle reader formats. All available versions of the book you choose are clearly displayed on its page.
- You can also browse through the site library, or browse books by category. The links for these options are below the search bar.
- Chances are, if you've heard of a book published before the 1920s, it's available for free at Project Gutenberg. Mark Twain, Jane Austen, and Franz Kafka are among the authors richly represented there.
- Use Free Book Search to expand your collection. http://www.freebooksearch.net is a powerful search engine that collects results from Project Gutenberg and hundreds of other sites. If you can't find what you're looking for at Project Gutenberg, Free Book Search is your next best bet.
- Search results include the type of download file that's available, if Free Book Search can tell. Not every book is available in every format, but results tend towards widely used formats like PDF and HTML.
- This is an excellent way to find older famous books that are still under copyright for free, but search results also often include notes, summaries, or discussions of the book instead of the actual book itself. You may need to dig to find what you want.
- Check the Internet Text Archive. The text archive is a part of the larger Internet Archive, a project to collect and preserve content posted on the web. It has over 4.5 million searchable texts, including many books, old census reports, and other published documents.
- The archive is easy to search, but tends towards obscure texts over popular ones. Nevertheless, it's a fascinating source of research material and surprisingly absorbing books you never knew existed.
- Check out books from your library. More and more libraries are offering eBooks to check out, just like physical copies. This has some disadvantages – most notably, the fact that the library's license only allows a few people to have the book “checked out” at any given time – but it's the best (legal) way to read new eBooks for free. You can usually sign up for the service at your library's website, assuming you've got an account with the library. Once you're in, you can browse the library's selection and download or reserve books directly from the Internet.
- Since eBook borrowing is designed to match physical borrowing as closely as possible, you can only have the book for a few weeks before you need to renew or return it. The book will be unusable after the due date otherwise.
- The waiting list for a very popular book (such as the latest Game of Thrones title) can be ludicrously long. Fortunately, most libraries will clearly display how many people are ahead of you on the list.
Curated Collections
- Check eBook retailers. Amazon offers a Kindle-specific library of more than 20,000 public domain eBooks. The iTunes App Store features an app called (fittingly enough) Free Books, which features a hand-curated collection around the same size. Barnes and Noble offer a wide range of free Nook-format short stories, excerpts, and previews (and the occasional whole book) from current authors such as Neil Gaiman and Mary Higgins Clark, as well as many public domain titles.
- Get free children's books. Children's Books Online is a repository of public domain children's books, most with illustrations. The books are organized by reading level (there's even a section for adult readers!), and some even have audio files of the book being read aloud. Be aware that the image quality of some of the books is grainy.
- Get free science fiction and fantasy books. Tor and Baen, two popular publishers of science fiction books, each offer a small library of stories for free to the public. Authors represented at Baen, which offers a few full novels in addition to nonfiction and short stories, include the likes of Poul Anderson and K.D. Wentworth. Tor's website provides original short fiction, updated regularly, but no full books to speak of.
- Get free romance books. Harlequin Books, one of the most prolific publishers of romance novels, offers a small handful of full romance eBooks for free. Free-eBooks' Romance category also offers a few romance novels, although they're confusingly mixed into books about picking up girls.
- Get free self-published books. Smashwords is a self-publishing site for amateur authors. Though there's a lot of chaff on the site, there are also some very solid stories, many of which are available for free. You can browse by category and then adjust results by price to quickly view all the free offerings in any genre.
Pirating Books
- Know what you're getting into. In this day and age, the average author makes less money than ever before from book sales. For every J.K. Rowling or Christopher Paolini out there who strikes it rich, there are a hundred, perhaps a thousand authors who scrape out a second income on residuals from their books while paying the bills with an unrelated job. When you pirate a book, more so than in the case of pirated films or music, you're taking money away from the authors (after all, they can't go on tour and charge $10 a head to make up the difference). If you like a pirated book, be sure to go and buy a new copy as soon as you're able.
- Use a peer-to-peer network. Since eBook files tend to be fairly small, one of the most efficient ways to download them is over a peer-to-peer network such as Soulseek or Ares Galaxy. Simply download and install one of these programs (or a similar program) and perform a search for the title or author you want.
- Be sure to figure out where the program saves your completed files, so you don't lose track of what you've downloaded.
- Torrent. You'll need to download a BitTorrent client such as µTorrent first, and then search for a torrent online. Torrent files themselves aren't illegal, so they aren't usually very hard to find. Torrents are a great way to download large bundles of books all at once, but if you're searching for a specific title, you might have less luck. Once you find a torrent file you like, download it and it should open in your client program automatically. Torrenting is generally faster than using a peer-to-peer network.
- Once you've finished downloading a torrent, you can choose whether or not to keep sharing it. Sharing it allows other people to download it more easily (and without others sharing their copies, you'd never have gotten yours), but it also puts you at higher risk of getting into trouble for illegally sharing files. Canceling the torrent once you're done is considered bad etiquette in the torrenting community, but that's the only repercussion you'll face if you do it.
Warnings
- Peer-to-peer file sharing networks can be dangerous. Always check that the file you're downloading not only has the name of the file you want, but is also the correct extension type (never download a .EXE program from a file sharing network), and a reasonable size for the type of file it is. Keep your antivirus program running at all times when downloading files this way.
