list of best free Books??? please share!

[NatCh]

Originally Posted by Dr. Drib

Harry asked a simple question, cmbs.

Why not answer it ...?

She did already answer it, Dr. Drib, up in post #71.

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by Sparrow

Anyone used Quasar Dragon ?

Looks an interesting site but it's new to me.

I agree: That does look like an interesting site. Thanks.


Don

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by NatCh

She did already answer it, Dr. Drib, up in post #71.

Ah, yes. I see. That specific question has been answered.



Don

[Dr. Drib]

I just found an interesting site called DailyLit, located here:

http://www.dailylit.com/

They offer both free books and copyrighted material.

Their philosophy is to offer enough of a selection every day for about 5 minutes of reading, until the entire work has been downloaded. Also, it looks like they offer a sense of community to their members, with questions for discussion and a participatory environment. I don't know if there's much action accumulating on the discussions, though.

Most of their free material is available here, I see, so perhaps there's not that much a surprise.

You might want to check it out for yourself.

I'm not affiliated with them in any way.


Don

[UncleDuke]

it is a shame that you feel picked on, maybe honesty has something to do with it, after all when the bebook give us your email address and get money off a bebook all the way up to a free bebook offer came out you talked about how your cyybook had a bad screen and now you want us to help you get one for your mother

sure you edited the original post about your screen and couldn't get into editing my quote of your post so you could keep the story straight, revisionist history is an honorable profession, how long have you worked for the presidential administration??

sure i posted my email address on your blog, sure you blocked the publication, it was the old goose and gander thing, what she does here is a far cry from what she allows there

sure there are bigger things to worry about than a person who types out of both sides of her keyboard, i've never posted a book here in my life and don't intend to start now, i write for a living and millions of people have heard the scripts i have written, think tv soap operas and industrial training films

[Dr. Drib]

OMG, I can't believe I'm looking at a ROMANCE site....uggghghgh.

This site:

http://allromanceebooks.com/category180.html

offers FREE Romance books, some of which are (GASP!) "Adult themed."

Well, if you're a decadent reader (just kidding! ), you might want to check them out.

As usual, here's a disclaimer: I have NOTHING to do with that website!

Anyway, if you like Romances, maybe there's something there for you.


Don

[cmbs]

Originally Posted by Dr. Drib

Harry asked a simple question, cmbs.

Why not answer it, if only to satisfy the newer people who may be reading this thread and wondering where they can obtain free ebooks.

Everyone on this site would like to find even more sites for free ebooks - assuming they're legal, of course. That was the intent of the original poster.

In all fairness, however, I'm confused about this phrase that you use: "you people." A number of people here have asked you some sincere questions - questions (I believe) that you originally asked of readers of this thread, as you yourself moved the thread onto a side-branch and away from the main emphasis of the original poster who opened the thread. However, that was a natural progression of the thread's organicitiy; nothing wrong there.

I just don't understand your sense of persecution when someone asks you a question. You've asked us questions, right?

Sincerely,
Don

This was answered an hour before you posted it.

"Oh, and if your question were sincere, you'd already know the answer, since I've said it quite clearly several times."

So what was your purpose in asking?

Oooops, I just saw that NatCh already said this. Sorry for repeating.

[cmbs]

Good job on the free ebook sites.

And don't forget http://manybooks.net/, my favorite for classics since they have the most classics in the most formats. Gutenberg has more classics, but fewer formats. Manybooks also has some more modern books as well, but mostly classics.

More free erotica at http://thesamhellion.com/

[Dr. Drib]

Feedbooks has an incredible selection of ebooks, nicely formatted for many ebook devices.

Here's their link:

http://www.feedbooks.com/

They offfer an easy-to-navigate system, unlike some sites that are very cluttered and confusing in their presentation.

In fact, some sites are so confusing that one often wonders where they learned web-design. (Bugs Bunny's Three Week School of WebDesign, perhaps? )

I like Feedbooks a lot, and find them second only to MobileRead's hand-crafted, personally assembled selections.

Have fun!!


Don

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by cmbs

As I said, I suspect we have a different definition of hand formatting. You can run ten books a day through software and spit out the results and post them online. You can even call it hand formatting. I don't call that hand formatting. It is of course no different from what Manybooks.net does, only they have over 23,000 separate books in a lot of file types. That's different file types for each and every book counting as one book. And their mobi files (which is what I read) don't have pre-determined settings which deprive me of choosing my own.

It's not humanly possible to hand format ten books per day if you're actually hand formatting them. Which involves reading them, selectively formatting the text, creating one or more tables of contents, possibly linking to and from footnotes, reading the book and checking for and fixing errors.

I'm not sure what you mean by "hand formatting." Adding a hard return manually after every paragraph break? Why bother; we have find & replace for that.

I don't mean "run it through some macros & throw the result in a converter."

I mean, look at the source text. Decide which macros are appropriate (for example, removing the hard returns after every line in a Gutenberg text). Scroll through the text, looking for chapter or other section breaks; mark as appropriate. If you find a pattern (e.g., they all start with the word "CHAPTER"), you might be able use Find-Replace or a macro to format them; otherwise, you do so manually.

Normalize all the text--make them all single-spaced paragraphs (or double if that's easier to work on), 100% sized text, not expanded or contracted. This is not necessary if coming from Gutenberg, but other sources, esp. converted from PDFs, might have problems.

Set up Word styles (or whatever your editing program has), so that each application of "Centered-bold-2pts larger font-marked for chapter break" takes only a couple of keystrokes or mouse clicks, instead of right-click, select text, scroll to font, type in size, scroll to bold, enter; right-click, select paragraph, select centered, add 12 pts before and 6 pts after, or whatever.

Format main body text. Choose how to indent, whether to be left-oriented or justified; apply by style instead of clicking on each paragraph individually.

Decide how to deal with links and footnotes, if any. For novels, there often aren't. Build a TOC--if you've formatted your chapter breaks, this can be done automatically. Simple formatted texts might be done in as little as half an hour. Most books, 1 1/2 to 3 hours each, depending on things like tables, poetry and other troublesome formatting features. Poorly-formatted originals would take longer.

However, as mentioned, people may upload 10 in a day because they *finished* all ten of those in a day, not because the start-to-finish process was done in less than 8 hours.

[pilotbob]

FYI: There is a whole Wiki topic filled with links to sources for free books.

https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Free_eBooks

If anyone here is aware of some that aren't three... or any have been mentioned here that aren't on the Wiki... please add it. That's what the Wiki is for.

BOb

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by cmbs

To me the main question is what are they distributing and how do they have the right to distribute it? As you said, some books are obviously illegal. Some books are obviously legal like Public Domain books. But why does any one blog or similar website have the right to distribute a lot of still in copyright ebooks from a lot of authors? MOST DON'T. Booksellers presumably do. Collaborative sites where authors go to publish their work do.

Even if an author is giving a book away for free, that doesn't make it legal for everyone else to do the same.

That's all true.

However, copyright law is (in the US) a matter of tort, not crime. That means it's only enforced if the damaged party wants to complain. Like breach of contract, it's only enforced if one of the parties involved cares about it.

Some authors set up free ebook downloads at their site, and while they don't officially allow others, they don't prevent them, either. They'd rather have the free publicity, but don't want the liability of giving actual permission, in case their publishing contracts change, or they decide to change how they deal with ebooks.

Copyright is not a law where you must get permission in advance to copy. Permission in advance protects you from litigation--lack of it does not require litigation, does not obligate an author to stop the activity. That doesn't mean all those sites are legit, but a site can be without specific permission and still be acceptable by the copyright owner.

ALSO: permission is not required to be publicized. An author can give a person permission to share their ebooks, and the sharer might not mention that on the site.

You've got to read the specific copyright notice on each book and if there's none - then nobody has permission to distribute.

The copyright notices on books are often useless. I've read plenty of public domain works that claim to be copyrighted by their publishers, when only the layout is copyrightable. And any site that could create an archive of free ebooks, could also create copyright notices of their choice.

I'm curious about which blogs or giveaway sites you think are questionable.

[cmbs]

Originally Posted by Dr. Drib

Feedbooks has an incredible selection of ebooks, nicely formatted for many ebook devices.

Here's their link:

http://www.feedbooks.com/

They offfer an easy-to-navigate system, unlike some sites that are very cluttered and confusing in their presentation.

In fact, some sites are so confusing that one often wonders where they learned web-design. (Bugs Bunny's Three Week School of WebDesign, perhaps? )

I like Feedbooks a lot, and find them second only to MobileRead's hand-crafted, personally assembled selections.

Have fun!!


Don

What websites confuse you? I find Manybooks.net very clean and easy to navigate. Fast loading too.

And what was your purpose in asking a question that had already been answered before? (re: post #88)

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by cmbs

What websites confuse you? I find Manybooks.net very clean and easy to navigate. Fast loading too.

And what was your purpose in asking a question that had already been answered before? (re: post #88)

Hi, cmbs, I'm glad you responded.

Actually, I find a number of websites confusing, as if put together by someone on a terminal dose of Ex-Lax. Look around the web and you should find a few that fit the definition of "cluttered" and "confusing" in their presentation.

I did not mention Manybooks as not being a clean-looking website. Can you tell me where I said that? I do, however, feel that Feedbooks offers a much better selection of books than manybooks; to me, the books at Feedbooks are more attractive than manybooks; and Feedbooks, to me, is a more robust site.

About your second paragraph, I confess to being confused, in not knowing what YOUR purpose is in asking me questions about MY purpose.



Sincerely,
Don

[Sydney's Mom]

I like this site

http://finding-free-ebooks.blogspot....0time%20offers

This is a subsite of the one Junior94 listed - it has the "ending soon" books. I check it often.