Do you love to read but hate to pay high prices for your printed entertainment? You’re not alone. Over the last few years there has been an absolute explosion of e-books on the Internet and on mobile devices and the best news about this is that a great many of them are absolutely free!
That’s right, you can get completely free books that you love and even free books you’ve never read before, just by having an Internet connection and the knowledge of where to go to find them. With that end in mind, I set off to find the best ways to get free eBooks on the ‘net and I now present those findings to you, dear readers. So, open your browser and read on! Project Gutenberg offers more than 40,000 eBooks in various formats, many of which are by successful but lesser known authors, that you can download for free. Foboko not only allows you to get eBooks for free but also to publish your very own eBook on their social network, and Manybooks offers a robust library of newer authors, real reader reviews and supports multiple languages.
Project Gutenberg: The pioneer of the free eBook movement.
Project Gutenberg was, as far as I know, the first online resource to offer free books for download, and is therefore ahead of the game. Here at Freewaregenius, we have mentioned Project Gutenberg as connected with various other programs before, but I decided to take a deeper look at it, especially since they were there at the beginning, so to speak.
With a library of more than forty thousand books available, you’re sure to find something that interests you. Many of the books you can find on Project Gutenberg are by successful authors of days gone by (such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or Charles Dickens, even Herman Melville!) that you may have heard of even if they didn’t wind up on the New York Times best sellers list as much as Stephen King. Nevertheless, the books you can find there are, without a doubt, interesting and widely acclaimed by both critics and readers alike. Bear in mind that everything you can find on Project Gutenberg has previously been published by what they call bona fide publishers,which simply means that each book on there was published by another company before it wound up being available for free there. You can even find things like Audio Books and sheet music there! As the first name in free eBooks, Project Gutenberg is always my first stop on any tour through the cyberverse, whether I’m looking for an old favorite or something I have never heard of or read before.
Foboko: For readers and authors alike.
Foboko is a bit different from Project Gutenberg, in that it is geared a bit more towards modern authors and therefore more contemporary readers. It can be thought of as a social network for book lovers, in some ways. It offers any reader the chance to get five free eBooks per month, and much of the material on Foboko is by recent authors that you may not know.
That’s because the other side of Foboko’s system is that of helping new authors get their name out in the reading community by giving them the chance to begin their own book through the Foboko interface, and even get feedback on content before it is completely finished. This is an invaluable resource and opportunity for the up-and-coming author that hasn’t had a lot of experience and/or hasn’t been published before, by offering them a chance to get their foot in the door, as the metaphor says. You can also create different groups to socialize and discuss your favorite authors or works, as well as actually speak with those authors. This is an unparalleled chance to bring authors and readers closer to each other to better appreciate what each of them goes through in the art process, not to mention the valuable experience that goes along with such interactions. I’d recommend Foboko to any aspiring author as well as any reader that is looking to get acquainted with new authors and their works.
Manybooks: a home for all things non-fiction.
Manybooks.net is another great site that offers free eBook downloads, but they differ from the other two I have mentioned in that they are a smaller site that offers mostly non-fiction subjects. This may seem limiting at first, but when you stop to look at the works available on there, you begin to see that by focusing more on non-fiction, they are able to give us a bit of a better selection on those subjects that fall into the non-fiction categories. They do have some fiction works as well as poetry and even a category that will offer you a random selection if you can’t decide on one by yourself.
They also support a multitude of languages, including some of the more rare languages, like Welsh and Tagalog. While other sites do have similar support, Manybooks is a high-quality site that can offer you another great resource for those non-fiction needs. They also offer a listing of RSS feeds that will help keep you informed of new content in the eBook world. Whether you’re looking for a book in Sanskrit or an electronic copy of Marie Lebert’s works, Manybooks is a great place to check, especially when other sites you have searched didn’t have what you were looking for.
So, now that you know the best places to get free eBooks on the Internet, get out there and find the one you’ve been dying to read, the one your friends told you about or discover a new story all on your own. No matter what you choose, you’ve got a head start by knowing the best places to search. Until next time,my friends.
