What are your favourite resources for free eBooks?

[Waflicka]

Good evening, folks. I haven't been on board the ereading bandwagon for too long (it's probably been a year or two), and something that I've always struggled with has been finding good, free works. I confess that I've had less than pleasant experiences navigating Amazon, Kobo and Smashwords for their free selections; I'll just say that it's difficult to determine whether positive reviews are fabricated.

So, I've developed my own little list of places to acquire free ebooks. MobileRead, as the newest addition to this list, was discovered solely because I was searching for an alternative to Project Gutenberg with less OCR scanning! Let me, therefore, say thank you for the service that you provide here. The library is so big that I don't even know where to begin!

However, public domain does eventually draw to a halt, and once you stop searching for public domain classics, it becomes all too easy to find yourself exploring a pirate website, only to realise what you're doing when you come across a book that should very clearly not be free. Now, prior to discovering MobileRead, my four main sources of free ebook discovery were: Adelaide University, ManyBooks, Baen Books and Weavespinner, where James Galloway's free SFF books are compiled after release.

As you can imagine, now that I've found what appears to be an impeccable selection of public domain books, my list has been shortened significantly! In fact, the only place I now know of where I can acquire free ebooks which were not penned by James Galloway and are not public domain is Baen Books, and as I've discovered from attempting to search for this very topic, you're all very aware that some time ago they drastically reduced the amount of titles offered in their free library.

I'm at an impasse! Help me, MobileRead, for I am not a regular library patron! The 'Deals, Freebies, and Resources' sub-forum looks splendid, but there's too much happening in there and I can't make heads or tails of it! What are your most frequently visited websites for this purpose?

[GeoffR]

www.feedbooks.com/publicdomain

[jgaiser]

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=132

[cortman]

I have to say that Mobileread has probably the highest quality public domain ebooks I've ever found.
If you're willing to shell out money, the Delphi Classics are also of excellent quality.

[AnemicOak]

Since you mentioned wanting non-public domain stuff...

http://blog.booksontheknob.org/ (ebook deals & freebies)
http://freebooks.ontheknob.com/ (Kindle freebies)

http://www.ereaderiq.com/freebies/ (Kindle freebies)

http://www.bookbub.com/ebook-deals (ebook deals)
http://www.bookbub.com/ebook-deals/free (freebies)

[exscentric]

I second http://www.ereaderiq.com/freebies/ for kindle, check it every day.

[Difflugia]

Once I got used to them, the easiest for me were the "advanced search" pages at Barnes & Noble and Amazon. The Amazon link is already for Kindle books, but you need to set the format at the B&N page to "NOOK book". Then enter a publisher and sort by price, low to high. The free ones will be at the top. You can then bookmark the page for each publisher that you want for easy reference. Here are example links for Agate Publishing at B&N and Amazon:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/?sor...book&view=list
http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=...ate&sort=price

Additionally, check the Amazon Kindle Best Seller List. Click on "Top 100 Free" and then click your favorite category on the left. Most of the free books that get posted here make it pretty high on the list (and that's where I find a lot of mine), so even if that were the only place you looked, you wouldn't miss out on much.

I'm also a big fan of Google Books. There are all kinds of things that aren't popular enough to make it to Project Gutenberg, but that are still fun (dozens of cookbooks from the 18th and 19th centuries, for example). The advanced search page isn't straightforward to find, so you might want to bookmark it. After your search, click on "Free Google Books" on the left. The big downside is that the OCR is sometimes pretty bad (especially for older books), but it's not a huge deal if you're OK reading PDF scans. And who knows? Your new favorite Brunswick Stew recipe might need squirrel.

[Calenorn]

For many of the Gutenberg titles presented in a friendlier format, try:

http://manybooks.net/

It's a great source for vintage kids adventure stories.

[wawasteele]

Originally Posted by Waflicka

I'm at an impasse! Help me, MobileRead, for I am not a regular library patron! The 'Deals, Freebies, and Resources' sub-forum looks splendid, but there's too much happening in there and I can't make heads or tails of it! What are your most frequently visited websites for this purpose?

Welcome to MobilRead. I have found it a valuable resource for all things ebook and audiobook related.

As far as a library goes, you don't have to be a regular patron. Check and see if you local library has an online book source. The most common is Overdrive. You don't have to go to the library after you get a library card. Most of those have to be done in person, but there are some exceptions. After you have a card, all the borrowing is done online. After a fairly short learning curve, you have opened up a lot of current books for free borrowing.

As for the 'Deals, Freebies, and Resources' sub-forum, look at the listing of the posts. For example, if you like mysteries, each month a new thread is started. In Nov, the mystery thread is titled "Free/Bargain Mystery/Suspense/Thriller November 2013". When you come to MobileRead, just look for that thread and read only the most recent posts. The deals expire quickly, so there is no need to read the entire thread. There are also threads for non-fiction, youth, romance, scifi, and probably others. Those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.

[bookaho!ic]

i check out the kindle free books and see if they are free on kobo (less hassle no need to convert

have found a few authors i now really enjoy on feedbooks - Nicky Charles and S.C. Stephens to name a few

[Waflicka]

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

Since you mentioned wanting non-public domain stuff...

http://blog.booksontheknob.org/ (ebook deals & freebies)
http://freebooks.ontheknob.com/ (Kindle freebies)

http://www.ereaderiq.com/freebies/ (Kindle freebies)

http://www.bookbub.com/ebook-deals (ebook deals)
http://www.bookbub.com/ebook-deals/free (freebies)

Indeed -- I already have too many public domain books! I see that a lot people here are eager to recommend various public domain resources regardless of that fact, though. Ah well! Thank you for these links, they look great.

Originally Posted by Difflugia

I'm also a big fan of Google Books. There are all kinds of things that aren't popular enough to make it to Project Gutenberg, but that are still fun (dozens of cookbooks from the 18th and 19th centuries, for example). The advanced search page isn't straightforward to find, so you might want to bookmark it. After your search, click on "Free Google Books" on the left. The big downside is that the OCR is sometimes pretty bad (especially for older books), but it's not a huge deal if you're OK reading PDF scans. And who knows? Your new favorite Brunswick Stew recipe might need squirrel.

That sounds enormously entertaining! I don't want to read OCR scans (that was why I found this website in my search for a Gutenberg alternative), so I'll look at the Advance Search options in Amazon and Barnes & Noble, but I may go without looking up the squirrel stews for now!

Originally Posted by wawasteele

Welcome to MobilRead. I have found it a valuable resource for all things ebook and audiobook related.

As far as a library goes, you don't have to be a regular patron. Check and see if you local library has an online book source. The most common is Overdrive. You don't have to go to the library after you get a library card. Most of those have to be done in person, but there are some exceptions. After you have a card, all the borrowing is done online. After a fairly short learning curve, you have opened up a lot of current books for free borrowing.

As for the 'Deals, Freebies, and Resources' sub-forum, look at the listing of the posts. For example, if you like mysteries, each month a new thread is started. In Nov, the mystery thread is titled "Free/Bargain Mystery/Suspense/Thriller November 2013". When you come to MobileRead, just look for that thread and read only the most recent posts. The deals expire quickly, so there is no need to read the entire thread. There are also threads for non-fiction, youth, romance, scifi, and probably others. Those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.

I'm really not a library patron; it was one of my main motivations for purchasing an ereader. I don't like giving books back at the end of my time with them. That being said, thank you for explaining the sub-forum. I had been under the impression that I'd have to go through the entire threads to find something worth reading. It's all a bit higgledy-piggledy!

[Froide]

In addition to many of the sites listed above, I frequent the following three user-curated freebies lists in the BN.com forums: "Free NOOKbook summary thread - please no OT" (NOOK Book freebies), "The Official OT Free NOOKbook summary thread" (off-topic posts as well as postings about freebie content, including audiobooks, available outside of the NOOK Store), and "Smashwords freebies worth considering" (self-explanatory).


Inkmesh.com is also a good source, when it's up and running.

[owly]

Kobo also has a "Free ebook" link http://www.kobobooks.com/ just under the header.

[jgoguen]

Do you have a direct link to that page? I don't see anything in the new store interface about free anything except for the "Free Apps" link in the footer.

Maybe when Kobo took away the listing of book formats they also took away the free books link

[jscarbo]

Even though the Baen free library doesn't have as many titles as it did in the past, most of the Baen Free CD's are still available for legal download and have an enormous amount of material. The only change is that you can no longer download individual titles. You have to download the entire cd and unzip it to get to the individual books. Many are duplicates that appear on several of the CD's. Here's the download link: http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/

Here is an annotated list of the contents of both the Cd's and the free library. It's out of date and is no longer completely accurate but is still very useful: http://www.allensmith.net/SciFi/Baen/Free.htm

The other resource I highly recommend for free speculative fiction is this one: http://www.freesfonline.de/RecommendedStories.html . There's an enormous amount of material but to find it all, you'll have to play around with the navigation until you become familiar with it.

Another resource is [link deleted] . Previously, I had concerns that some of the books there may not be in public domain, at least in the US, but it appears that the newly re-designed website has corrected this problem and eliminated the titles in question. [It still hosts in-copyright ebooks]

Finally, here's a massive list of links to free, legal ebooks: http://www.techsupportalert.com/cont...oks-online.htm