Thursday Thirteen #15

13 sites with free ebooks

Seeing as how the grand prize for the Adult Summer Reading Program is a Sony Ereader, and we will soon have ebooks available through the catalog (coming eventually), I decided to list 13 sites from which you can legally download free ebooks. In most cases, the files are available as PDFs and can be downloaded to your computer (if you don't have a dedicated reader). They are:

1) Amazon's Kindle Store's Free Books Collections- including Limited Time Promotional Offers and Most Popular Classics. Don't have a Kindle? Never fear there are Kindle apps you can download free for just about any device, listed here.

2) Internet Archive- Interesting assortment of collections from dance manuals from 1490 to 1929 to Harvard Classics to a collection of cookbooks and books on home economics.

3) Open Library- the seemingly endless list of subjects one can browse includes astronauts, Texas, diaries, Riots, Assam, Pleistocene, Colette, Carpentry, Accessible Books (and those are just the examples from their home page).

4) Project Gutenburg- which we all know and love. :)

5) Many Books .Net- where you can search by authors, titles, languages, and genres (which includes such things as audiobooks, banned books, Canadian Literature, cooking, correspondance, Creative Commons, espionage, nautical, occult, and pirate tales among many more).

6) Suvudu's Free Library-Science fiction and fantasy site, regularly updated, so if you don't see anything you like, you might want to subscribe to their monthly updates.

7) Barnes & Noble Free ebooks- You have to create an account to download the books, which doesn't take long (just remember your password).

8) Classic Authors .Net- not just novels, but essays, poems, plays- no longer will you need to worry that the library's only copy of Oedipus Rex is checked out.

9) World Wide School Library- I haven't had much chance to explore this site, but what I have seen was really cool, in all subjects: literature, history, geography, science, social sciences, other languages.

10) Bookyards- Includes biographies and other pertinent information with author pages.

11) Free Ebooks .Net-The first screen for each title gives you the option of reading it online, read as a pdf, read on mobi, and read as an epub.

12) Free-Book 58 Search .Com- Yes, it does have free ebooks, but their subject headings are rather confusing, leading to unrelated titles or to dead ends. I looked up books on the history of the Holocaust and got a book titled The Writings of George Washington. Got into Fiction, click on Westerns, and then click on Louis L'Amour, and pull up The Songs of the Ridings by Frederic Moorman. It wouldn't be my first choice, but if you can't find something specific on any other site, you might try here.

13) Fictionwise- Despite the title of this website, much of its offers are nonfiction, even the free titles: which include The Iraq Study Group Report, Oxford Paperback Thesaurus, Oxford Concise Medical Dictionary, and Oxford Dictionary of World History.