Speaking of downloading free books.
I made a list of
one hundred free classic ebooks at
http://bit.ly/8bTo8F where you can pick a book link which will take you to one of four free ebook sites such as Kobobooks.com & mybebook.com. This list is mostly English & French authors like Dickens, Wilde, Bronte, Dumas, Hugo so if that's what you like, that is what is on the list.
The download formats are EPUB, Unicode Plain Text, HTML, Mobile-Pocket , Plucker, QiOO Mobile & txt. Kindle users, if any of the formats give you trouble, you can also try manybooks.net (which has lots of traffic from Kindle related blogs, so they must know something).