What is the best way to look for free books?

[Keef]

I have gone on mobileread and found a lot of books I never heard of. Do you know if there is a way to search for free books by author or title?

[church mouse]

If you are looking for mainly out of copyright stuff with some new titles as well you can try this site

http://manybooks.net/authors.php

[toomanybooks]

My favorite three sites are

here at mobileread
manybooks.net
feedbooks.com

All three let you search for authors or titles.

I would also recommend epubbooks.

Baen's free library is great for new sci-fi titles.

For newer books, Inkmesh has several searches for free ebooks.

[Worldwalker]

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

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
(note: if you have not seen Google's logo today, GO LOOK. It's playable.

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 - it misses a lot - 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.

P.S.

I almost forgot: get calibre. Its support forum is a few boards down from here.

[hols57]

Just tried Munseys but it is almost impossible to navigate!

[happy_terd]

I noticed quite a few typos in books I downloaded from feedbooks.com. Free is free I guess.

[GA Russell]

I haven't figured out how to download a non-DRM from Munseys. So what I do is have the screen show the book, then cut and paste it into MSWord, and save it as rtf.

It works for my jetBook Lite, but there's got to be a better way.

[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by GA Russell

I haven't figured out how to download a non-DRM from Munseys. So what I do is have the screen show the book, then cut and paste it into MSWord, and save it as rtf.

It works for my jetBook Lite, but there's got to be a better way.

1. Use the search box to find a book you want. For our example, we'll search on "Tom Swift". Don't forget to select "title" from the dropdown to the right.

2. Scroll down the results to find "Tom Swift and His Motorcycle" (or any other you might happen to want).

3. Click on the title of the book.

4. Send someone to where I live to have the car with the malfunctioning car alarm towed and crushed.

5. On the book details page, pick your preferred format from the "Select One" dropdown just above the grayed-out "Download" button.

6. The "Download" button will be properly colored instead of grayed-out. Click it.

7. Save the book wherever you park your ebooks.

8. Load it into calibre, massage the metadata, tag as needed.

9. Upload to your device.

[GA Russell]

Worldwalker, I must have missed the Mobipocket option in the list. I see it now, and it downloaded without difficulty.

I must be losing my mind!

[dreams]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

4. Send someone to where I live to have the car with the malfunctioning car alarm towed and crushed.

[KayakerNC]

Originally Posted by Keef

I have gone on mobileread and found a lot of books I never heard of. Do you know if there is a way to search for free books by author or title?

Google is your friend.
Search example:
"Name of Book" "Author's Name" free ebook

[jj2me]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

Search: Inkmesh. Sadly, it's not a very comprehensive search engine - it misses a lot - but as far as I know, it's the only ebook-specific one out there.

Wow, terrific list.

If you're only interested in the major bookstores associated with devices, like Sony, Kindle, or Nook, I've found that Inkmesh is pretty reliable in finding their new offerings. Has anyone seen Inkmesh miss any of them?

For the lazy who just want free ebook alerts to come to them in the form of RSS feeds, here are some feeds, in alphabetic order (e.g., have Google Reader (or any other RSS reader) do the auto-fetching):

• Books on the Knob: http://feeds.feedburner.com/BooksOnTheKnob
  
• Free ebooks on Kindle: http://feeds.feedburner.com/freekindlebooks
  
• Latest free books on Kindle: http://feeds.feedburner.com/latestfreebooksonkindle
  
• manybooks.net: http://manybooks.net/index.xml
  
• Sony free ebooks - AddAll ebooks: http://feeds.feedburner.com/addallsony

Oh, the woes of plenty. Who can read all this?