Caution for the Curious

[mrwrite]

I did find a site to (sorta) recommend:
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu
Search engine gives you more than you wanted, but it has a few
gems. LOADS of classics. A few useful tech books.
Most everything is in PDF. Many books link to other sites including
Google, Tea Tree Press, archive.org etc.
A few links are not reachable.

I have tracked a few sites for free e-books.
I often find pages tht say "Twenty great places for free ebooks."
Sadly, the writer fails to check any further than the front page
to see if the ebook sites are indeed what they say.

Here are a few DISAPPOINTING sites, that were lucky enough
to be mentioned by a few lazy web-writers. Just a warning,
should you stumble across the same recommendations.

http://4ebooks.org/
"Free programming and computer books" according to the home page.

Very few books found. NONE are free. Cheapest is $0.99 and like nearly everything else on the site, is available from Amazon. The archives are empty. The main pages have ads fro Glade plug-in, baby supplies, and curiously worded ads for software.

memoware.com
"Free Ebooks for Amazon Kindle and Nook" according to the home page.

Unless users can read files in PalmReader, Plucker, iSilo3 and TomeRaider, this
website isn't helpful.

The search engine allows for only Palm OS, EPOC, and Pocket PC.
It also alows for several Document formats, like "Repligo."

Epub and Kindle are NOT on the list.

Under History a few titles are:
Barack Obama's Inaugural Address
The United States Constitution.txt
Castro-Reden 2008 by Fidel Castro
2 Page Ebook by Felix Constantinescu
Romanian translation of the Native American Walum Olum text from the English version.

zillr.org/
An abandoned site with book links.
Each link leads to a search engine with more links.
Each link on the search engine leads to more links.
(Reminds me of the websites that promised "Free Screensavers."

globusz.com
links to other sites. In the form of ads.
Also links to "Free eBooks. Download Now"
which is among others that leads to...
http://www.scribd.com/
Some links say: "Unlimited eBooks On Any Device. 300K+ Titles. Join Scribd Now."
Site says: "Unlimited Books for $8.99 a month."

Manybooks.net
They have a search tool. Typed in "excel."
Best match was, "The Crusade of the Excelsior"
Under computer books such titles as:
The Cyberpunk Fakebook Chapters 1-3, by St. Jude and R.U. Sirius
Man and Superman, A Comedy and a Philosophy, George Bernard Shaw
Not worth browsing.

http://www.snipfiles.com/
Site has screensavers along with ebook. This is suspecious.
Many sites have malware disguised as screensavers.
Found a few good book titles. Oddly they did not list the formats.
Tried to download "Thinking in C."
A web pages opened up. My virus checker prevented it. More bad
news, the further I checked. Aviod this site.

bookyard.com
Typical Computer book title, "Practical Thery Of Programming"
Typed in excel in the search. Among other entries was:
"Using a Excellent Mattress"
Everything is in PDF. An odd assortment of articles disguised as books
under dubious catagories.

freebookspot.es
Always cautious of a site that uses a foreign domain.
I always do a whois search when I notice I am about to use
a foreign domain.

Odd. NO ownership information. Only the second time I
have ever found one of those. The other was a free video
site that was blocked by my virus checker.

Just to be fair, I look for a book on spreadsheets. It had a
few. Clicked and found a few ads for games (NSFW).

Also found several download icons. Usual tip-off for tricks
to get you to click on the wrong one and see either ads or
have downloads for malware.

Found the right one for the book. It is an .rar file.
(OFTEN used to hide malware, but not always.) Clicked
on it and got a page with more ads. Some blocked by my
virus protection. I will skip this site. You have been warned.

onlineprogrammingbooks.com
They are not all free. Each book leads to another site.
Some are actually a series of web pages to read.

[Critteranne]

Originally Posted by mrwrite

Manybooks.net
They have a search tool. Typed in "excel."
Best match was, "The Crusade of the Excelsior"
Under computer books such titles as:
The Cyberpunk Fakebook Chapters 1-3, by St. Jude and R.U. Sirius
Man and Superman, A Comedy and a Philosophy, George Bernard Shaw
Not worth browsing.

ReallY? I have always liked Manybooks.net. Maybe it depends on what you're looking for. If you're just looking for a book on computing, you probably shouldn't visit a site that specializes in public domain fiction, literature, poetry, history, etc. There aren't going to be a lot of computing books on a site that offers mostly public domain ebooks because not many people were using excel spreadsheets in 1923. So you're left with Creative Commons ebooks on computing, as well as the Shaw ebook that accidentally got categorized as a computing book.

On the other hand, it is a lot of fun to browse categories. Click. Pulp. Oh, look, it's a Robert E. Howard novel! Click. Nautical. Oh, cool, Jules Verne! They have everything from Ghost Stories to Pirate Stories to Philosophy.

The search engines on the free ebook sites are often a problem if you are just looking for something general, probably because there is so much on those sites. Most searches will be looking at the title, author name, and maybe even description. So you're looking for something on hacking, and you wind up finding William Makepeace Thackeray instead. That doesn't mean the site is bad -- maybe you need a site with a better advanced search feature. Or maybe you're looking for a more specialized site that only carries computing books, not tons of classics and pulp fiction and the like?

I think it might be ... stretching it... to complain because you were disappointed by sites "mentioned by a few lazy web-writers." Maybe those writers weren't lazy --- maybe they simply weren't looking for tech books, which seems to be what you're most interested in. After all, if you look at a site like The Online Books Page and find "a few gems," you might be expecting more out of a free ebook site than you can get.

It's also possible those writers wrote their reviews a couple of years ago, and the sites they were reviewing have since changed hands, or changed the services they offer. For example, scribd (http://www.scribd.com/) used to be a site for uploading and sharing documents, and for publishers to promote their books, but they recently changed to become a sort of Netflix for books service. However, I can still log in with my old account and search for documents posted by users. I'm pretty sure new members can still create a free account and search for free stuff other users have posted -- brochures, legal documents, legal forms, presentations and reports, etc. However, categories include things like "School Work," so that free book you get might be somebody's Computing 101 project. You do get what you pay for.

Looking for new ebooks on free ebooks site is an uphill battle. The legitimate sites are posting what's in the public domain. If they post newer stuff, then of course they can get in major trouble from the publishers. If you find a site with lots of free, up-to-date computer and tech books, then there's a good chance it's not a legitimate site. Either that or the books aren't very good, and that's why they're free.

[Critteranne]

And don't forget Munseys. Of course, they have lots of free public domain ebooks. They also have reader reviews and allow users to tag books, so that can make things easier to search -- and sometimes harder to search because there is so much on the site, and so many possible tags.

The site isn't what it once was. The owner hasn't blogged since last June, for example. But there is still a lot there, including a lost of post-1923 pulp fiction that fell into the public domain. And a "Browse by Tag" feature that shows the most popular tags.

[Lemurion]

I'm with Critteranne on Manybooks.net - I've found lots to read there. Mostly PD SF from the 30's-50's that never had its copyright renewed.

[Critteranne]

OK, I'm trying to post this again. The Gizmo's Freeware site has a page full of Free Computer & Internet Books Online. They're my favorite site for freeware because of the reviews, comments from users, guidelines about what programs can be listed, etc.

They list 119 sites, and users have mentioned more in the comments. Not everything is going to be up your alley. (They list Memoware, which does use mostly Palm formats. But a program like Calibre should be able to convert them into a format you like as they are DRM-free. )

[scottken]

I also like manybooks.net. It's a great place to look for decently formatted out of copyright works, easily downloadable in many different formats.

WHY one would look there for recent, in copyright books on Excel is frankly beyond me.

Nonetheless, looking there under Genres>Computers brings up a host of titles, including recent ones by Cory Doctorow, Bruce Sterling, and Lawrence Lessig as well as historical titles by Charles Babbage. And complaining about Man and Superman when much of that play concerns the effects of the industrial age on humanity again seems to miss the point.

The poster typed in "Excel" and got a bunch of titles with words with "excel" as part of its root. That is hardly the site's problem. That's just a sloppy query.

[crich70]

www.feedbooks.net has some good books both free PD and new non-free books and editions of olderPD books that are being sold as well. I'm with the others. It depends on what you're looking for at some sites. You won't find books by living authors at sites like manybooks for example unless the author has made them CC books. And don't forget there are a ton of books in the PD right here at MR. Enough to keep a person occupied with reading them for years.

[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by mrwrite

Manybooks.net
They have a search tool. Typed in "excel."
Best match was, "The Crusade of the Excelsior"
Under computer books such titles as:
The Cyberpunk Fakebook Chapters 1-3, by St. Jude and R.U. Sirius

I appreciate your survey of several sites, but I'd be happy to visit any search page that promoted St. Jude and R.U. Sirius from the ancient Mondo 2000 days. Virtually everyone who wrote for that magazine lived in the same house in SF, which lent a personal touch to nascent cyberculture that is usually affected or faked today. They were rather nice people, too.

Long ago, a few poems of mine appeared in an anthology of stories that someone happened to leave at the Mondo house and several people read it. A month later, the titles of a few of my poems became headings in their articles -- not because they were stealing the titles but because the titles appeared in a book that people around the house decided was important. The inside references were for people who were involved enough in that culture to know about the book.

[Mencken]

Searching for information on something I had read recently, my search engine came back with a link at

http://getebook.org/

to a book that I decided to download.

Well, then I downloaded the book in zip format. And when I unzipped the thing, I get another zip file plus a text file telling me to go to yet another Web site and enter a password to unlock the book I downloaded.

Is this a common practice? Is this fishy? Do I have cause to be, as mrwrite was, disappointed?

[koland]

Don't know about disappointed.

But, I'd be willing to bet that it's pirated and that you would be at risk of malware at the sites you get referred to from such a download.

[cromag]

Sounds fishy to me, especially since it seems to be playing off a similarity to a legit site called "Gatebook (DOT) com."