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Old 06-02-2010, 11:25 PM   #7
Worldwalker
Curmudgeon
Worldwalker ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Worldwalker ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Worldwalker ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Worldwalker ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Worldwalker ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Worldwalker ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Worldwalker ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Worldwalker ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Worldwalker ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Worldwalker ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Worldwalker ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
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Join Date: Feb 2010
Device: PRS-505
I'm a little confused by why you have "free" in quotes. You want them to be not-free in some way? *baffled look*

Anyway, I've pasted in my standard list of favorite free ebook sites below. But if you're looking for recommendations for specific books, not specific sources, that's going to be a bit trickier without knowing what you like.

I'm into mysteries, so of course the Sherlock Holmes stories are a natural. I just started reading John T. McIntyre's Ashton-Kirk stories, which are just as atmospheric for a different atmosphere, and fascinating. One of my projects for this summer is assembling and reading all the hard-boiled detective stories I can find.

If you like SF (please, kacir, not scifi!) and fantasy, then follow kacir's suggestions and run straight to the Baen Free Library. Project Gutenberg and the sites that scrape it have been reprinting a lot of stories from classic SF magazines which have fallen out of copyright, too, and a lot of golden-age works.

If you like the old pulp adventures, the works of Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs are available -- I believe one of our fellow MobileReaders has packed up some nice omnibus editions of them up in the book section. For those people who think of REH as the author of Conan and that's all, you have a treat in store when you read the rest of his work.

Do you want something a bit more literate than mighty thews and clashing steel? Try the Harvard Classics. They have their own bookshelf over at Project Gutenberg.

And finally, here's my list of my favorite free (all gratis, most libre) ebook sources:

Right here on MobileRead is a good start -- the ebooks are built by hand by MobileRead members, and in my opinion they have the best formatting. There are a lot of other good ebook sites out there. Here's my personal free ebook source list:

Public Domain

MobileRead - best formatting, limited selection (hand-built by MobileRead members)

ManyBooks - PG scraper, but sometimes has books from other sources, good formatting

Feedbooks - mostly scrapes PG, improves formatting

Project Gutenberg - the granddaddy of them all, phenomenal selection

Munseys - painful to use, but has books nobody else does

the Internet Archive - generally only the scans are readable

Google Books - most of the time, what's good isn't free, and what's free isn't good

Free non-PD

Baen Free Library - amazing selection; also, they will tempt you into buying books

5th Imperium - Baen CD collections

Other Things

Search: Inkmesh. Sadly, it's not a very comprehensive search engine, at least when it comes to free ebooks - it misses a lot of them - but as far as I know, it's the only ebook-specific one out there.

If you're using free ebooks, it's only right to give something back: proofread a page a day at the Distributed Proofreading Project.
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