Best place to find free public domain texts?

[franklekens]

What do you consider the best sites for downloading free versions of public domain texts?

To break down the sites I most regularly go to:

https://www.gutenberg.org/
Gutenberg obviously has the largest number of books on offer. And I can't complain too much about their epub implementation, they mostly work reasonably well on my reader (Kobo Aura).

http://gutenberg.net.au/
Still, whenever one of the Gutenberg books is available on Gutenberg Australia, I tend to find its formatting is better (better margins, adjustable margins &c).

http://www.feedbooks.com/
Even better are what free public domain texts can still be found at Feedbooks. Gutenberg is always their source, but they've made them into nice real ebooks with covers &c.
However, it seems they're offering fewer and fewer public domain titles for free and seem to want to push commercial versions of the same titles. That's their good right and mostly those editions aren't expensive, but still. I'm not sure I want to pay anything if all they've done is apply some formatting (as opposed to real proofreading & editing of texts, as real publishers like Penguin and OUP tend to do, for instance).
I mean really, what's the difference between
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4500
and
http://www.feedbooks.com/item/446972...ith-collection
that it would justify paying 2 euro (rather than donate 2 euro to Gutenberg!)?

(Incidentally, why is it that this particular novelist's work is packed into a single file and separate titles are hardly available? That didn't use to be the practice on Gutenberg.)


http://manybooks.net/
Then there's Manybooks. It's been awhile since I've tried that. It used to be my experience those editions were somewhere in between the raw Gutenberg files (in the days when they weren't so e-book friendly) and Feedbooks: good enough, but if a better alternative was available I'd try that.

http://girlebooks.com/
And then there's this site for female authors exclusively. Good epubs, I *think*. It's been quite a while since I've tried any from here.

Any worthwhile additions or alternatives to this list?
(Apart from the mobileread forums itself, where some titles can also be found.)

[Dr. Drib]

Try Mobileread's fine Library.

I thought the girliebooks site no longer existed according to some thread here that I visited once.

[Tarana]

Amazon, B&N have a lot. Kobo not so much.

[Cinisajoy]

Amazon and here.

[issybird]

Fadedpage for books in the Canadian public domain and the University of Adelaide for books in the Australian public domain.

Check your local listings, as the saying goes.

[MartyTX]

25 sites for free books are discussed here:

https://ebookfriendly.com/free-publi...books-sources/

[Katsunami]

Feedbooks

(I like their simple, but clean layout.)

[doubleshuffle]

Originally Posted by Dr. Drib

I thought the girliebooks site no longer existed according to some thread here that I visited once.

Just checked and they're back.

[franklekens]

Thanks for all the suggestions. Yes, girlebooks is around. Their search function doesn't work too well, though; and browsing their site is a little cumbersome. Otherwise fine.

The site I miss most is Munseys.com, but I suspect they also had material there that wasn't really out of copyright. Was that one of the reasons they closed down?

Fadedpages looks interesting.
I've just tried manybooks.net again and see that I don't like their formatting. In their epubs, all paragraph breaks get a blank line, I *hate* that.

[doubleshuffle]

Originally Posted by franklekens

I've just tried manybooks.net again and see that I don't like their formatting. In their epubs, all paragraph breaks get a blank line, I *hate* that.

Never used manybooks, but out of interest I 've just downloaded a book from them. VERY basic formatting, but what bugs you is very easy to fix:

Open book in Sigil or the Calibre Editor, check for the standard paragraph class (in my example it's calibre5), open the stylesheet and change this

.calibre5 {
    display: block;
    margin-bottom: 1em;
    margin-left: 0;
    margin-right: 0;
    margin-top: 1em
    }

to this:

.calibre5 {
    display: block;
    margin-bottom: 0;
    margin-left: 0;
    margin-right: 0;
    margin-top: 0;
    text-indent:1.2em
    }

Done in a minute. I think Calibre (which I don't really use) also has ways to automatically change some formatting.

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by franklekens

Thanks for all the suggestions. Yes, girlebooks is around. Their search function doesn't work too well, though; and browsing their site is a little cumbersome. Otherwise fine.

The site I miss most is Munseys.com, but I suspect they also had material there that wasn't really out of copyright. Was that one of the reasons they closed down?

Fadedpages looks interesting.
I've just tried manybooks.net again and see that I don't like their formatting. In their epubs, all paragraph breaks get a blank line, I *hate* that.

I don't know why. Perhaps he just died or declared bankruptcy. He was NOT a friendly person, of that I can readily attest.

[radius]

Originally Posted by Dr. Drib

I don't know why. Perhaps he just died or declared bankruptcy. He was NOT a friendly person, of that I can readily attest.

The blog entries at Munsey's were often abrasive in tone, and I am not particularly fond of the formatting and coding of their books, but the focus and promotion of pulp/crime material was excellent. It certainly made me much more aware of that material; especially back when it was still Black Mask (and the focus was a little tighter).

I am sorry to see Munsey's go.

[ZodWallop]

Standard Ebooks offers very nicely formatted ebooks with attractive covers. Their selection is still pretty small. But I've been satisfied with the quality of what I found there.

[TuxGirl]

Not as fond of the formatting, personally, but archive.org occasionally has a couple that gutenberg doesn't have.

[WillAdams]

The best aggregator for public domain (and legitimately freely available) books is:

http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/