Books in French, Dutch, German?
 

I like to (try to) keep my foreign language skills up to date by reading books in foreign languages.

I recently discovered that Libri.de is offering epub books in German, and was wondering if anyone knew of online stores that had books in French or Dutch in formats the 505 can use. (Or additional places to find German ones.) Paying with a credit card and downloading the books could be really cost-effective for me compared with shipping from Europe to the U.S.!

FWIW, I'm looking for lightish recent fiction in genres like historical fiction, mystery, or fantasy. I'm sure it would be easy to find Faust or Mme. Bovary in the public domain but I can't take that kind of thing on the subway after a long day at work--that's what college was for! :rolleyes:

I don't read either French or Dutch so I'm not really able to help too much. The 505 has been released in France and I believe Fnac (a French bookstore) sells books for it.

You could also try posting your question in the French or German sections of MobileRead.

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=158

Thanks very much! It took a little surfing around, but I figured out that FNAC has a separate site for ebooks, http://livreelectronique.fnac.com/. Possibly I'll ask about Dutch books in the French forum, in case there are any Belgians around. Cheers.

Weltbild is selling a Cybook with mobile Adobe Digital Editions but their ePubs will obviously also work on the PRS-505, see Weltbild eBooks.

If you try

www.manybooks.net

and click on "languages", you'll find many different ones listed.

True, these are all p.d., but well worth reading anyway! I'm sure you could find something that would appeal to you.....

hi bradamant, i see you've found the fnac already, to add to the other suggestions already given, there are a few other french ebookstores, take a look in the french forum for a few threads discussing / listing them. the selection of recent (non pd) books is still woefully small (not nearly comparable to english language ebooks) but little by little it's getting better, and new publishers concentrating specifically on ebooks are appearing.

also, on feedbooks.com there is french, english and spanish available ; a lot of pd, but also a lot of contemporary authors releasing their work under a cc licence. recently, paolo coelho added his work, in fact.

hopefully you'll find what you're looking for !

Just wanted to update and note that I've successfully purchased and read books from Libri.de and http://livreelectronique.fnac.com/. The page-numbering system is a little different than what I've seen on American ebooks but they worked like a charm.

Purchasing German books would really interest me also - and so, you had no problems whatsoever with the purchasing, download and transfer of the books?

Best Wishes
David

Hi, You could try http://lifetimeebooks.net - if gives you 11.000 ebooks for the Sony PRS only for $9.95 in multiple languages (Dutch,French,German etc.) ! it's great :)

What makes them better/different than free sources like MR, Feedbooks and Manybooks?

They have a huge library of quality ebooks containing the greatest classics and new ebooks including any genre and all generated for the Sony PRS. (some examples i copied from the website of authors:Jane Austen, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, Jules Verne, Shakespeare, H Rider Haggard, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, George Gissing, H G Wells, Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain, Grimm etc.)
11.000 ebooks for the price of one.. I myself think it's a great service. Instant access anywhere to all the great titles they have. But it's your opinion to give :)
cheers!

FULL DISCLOSURE: Be Aware

This is a site that charges $9.95 per month for PD books.

Be careful with your money. All these books are in the public domain.


Thank you,
Don (Moderator

Bonjour!

New at this and somewhat confuse. I have a kindle 2 and am too looking for French books as I am a French Canadian living in LA. All those great web suggestion, will those downloads be compatible on my K2? Merci merci!

There is a new site for french books in Quebec, it is http://www.jelis.ca

Aristée

Hi there!

I know you said you're not looking for public domain, but:
1) they're not all boring
2) some public domain stuff is recent (and just not copyrighted)
3) other people might be interested

So here I share with you what I think is the best ressource for ebooks in French: http://www.ebooksgratuits.com/

You can sort them by authors (including some translation of English authors, actually), by type of text (short story, novel, poetry, play...) and by genre (historical, fantasy/sf...)

If you go to "news" there will be a link to download a zip file with all the files they had available at the time, in .lrf format. (or in pdf, or for mobipocket).

Although that probably won't work for you, you probably would prefer looking around and just downloading a few here and there.

They seem to be a small team but they add new content, I check back from time to time.
The only thing is that some of the books might not be public domain depending on where you are. For such books that aren't public domain everywhere, they have a warning in the summary.

Anyway, hope you'll find something you like.