|
Results vary. The Amazon Kindle offerings are often good, depending on whether or not your a fan of the genres frequently offered. As mentioned, lots of romance and Christian fiction. I'm a fan of the first but rarely read the latter. Often a book is a freebie because they want to promote the author's newest work and will, for example, give away the first book in a series or something from the backlist. It's helpful to become familiar with the names of certain publishers because the summary alone (when there is one) isn't always enough to tell you what you're getting. Certain publishers I will grab every time, others I generally pass over.
Smashwords freebies can be a crapshoot, but that's true for some of the non-free content as well. I do like the site, and I support it because I want it to flourish as a self-publishing platform, but the nature of such a platform guarantees that quality will vary. Fortunately, because of their distribution channels, you can often find reviews for at least the same author on Amazon or another site, if not the actual book you're thinking of downloading. My biggest beef with them is that the epub versions are usually great but sometimes the other formats are missing most of the metadata.
Barnes & Noble can be frustrating because you often don't know what you are getting. You will find that many of the freebie reviews on B&N are people upset because it wasn't made clear that an item was only a first chapter preview or something similar. It's especially confusing because there's often a "sample" button available for an item that turns out to only be, say, 20 pages long in it's entirety. You can't go by file size because sometimes that number is mostly the cover image. But then, Amazon sometimes has the same problem so it's not strictly a B&N issue.
Baen's offerings are exceptional if you're a fan of the genres there, which I am. I can't say enough good things about them.
The MR Library has an excellent selection of quality ebooks. This is probably the only site where I can pretty much guarantee there won't be any horrible formatting issues. The offerings here are top notch.
Sometimes it really just comes down to whether or not the offerings at any site are in one of your preferred genres.
Feedbooks has some really good free stuff, both classics and originals. I've gotten quality stuff there in a variety of genres.
Project Gutenberg is an excellent resource, but try to find it here at MR first if you want better formatting. However, I do not mean to denigrate PG in any way because they provide an amazing service. "Pretty formatting" was never the goal. The goal is to basically duplicate the original text, and changes are only made if it can be agreed that something was a printing error, and not something intended by the author.
|