I ran across an ebook site today called Forgotten Books (
http://www.forgottenbooks.com). I had run across it before, years ago, but had forgotten it (no pun intended. ha). I am not very familiar with Scribd, but it looks like Forgotten Books is mainly a subscription service along the lines of Scribd.
In case you're wondering, yes, the site has been mentioned before on Mobileread. However, I noticed that Forgotten Books seems to have made a lot of changes, and they're big ones, since even the last post about it, to where it is almost unrecognizable as the same outfit now.
If you don't have anything against subscription services (I personally don't care for them), you might want to check it out and see what you think. The service is $8.99/month. They offer a 7-day free trial. They say that they have 400,000 some-odd books available, and you can download (for keeps) as many as you want if you are a "member" (i.e., subscriber).
As far as I can tell, all of the books have reading (with Forgotten Books' proprietary web-based app) and/or download (pdf and pdf optimized for Kindle) options to the PC or Mac; there is also an option to download to your smart phone or other ereader. Before trying to read or download these books you should be aware that
Forgotten Books does not provide all of the pages of those books to you if you are a non-subscriber; i.e., some of the pages will be missing (sort of like the previews that Amazon offers of the dead-tree (paper) books that they sell).
It looks like most of the books, by far, are in the public domain. You probably can get most of them free also from the Gutenberg Project (
http://www.gutenberg.org), the Internet Archive (
http://archive.org), Google Books (
http://books.google.com/books),
et al. However, not all of the books are in the public domain! For example, I found two good Bible commentaries, from a series called
The Layman's Bible Commentary, which were published in the 1960's.
Also, Forgotten Books provides to subscribers several really cool features that you can't get at those other websites. I am a line art junkie--I love the old line art images that are found in a lot of the books published before the printing of photographs in books became more common. Forgotten Books has an image search feature with which you can search through all of the images (there are
millions of them, and not just line art, but photographs, and others) extracted from all of their books!
Now, none of the above was what I primarily made this post for. I made this post primarily to let you know that
Forgotten Books will send you one free what they call "premium" book per day, via email, if you get an account with them.
Forgotten Books provides all of the pages of these books to those with accounts. Folks, that is 365-366 per year! Wow!
You do
not have to be a subscriber to get an account and the account is free. It is a little bit difficult to find information on their website about how to get an account, but if you will click the thumbnail of any book that you see, you should get a dialogue box telling you how to join.
Based upon their past free books of the day, they send books from both non-fiction and fiction categories, and from a large variety of genres.