The 10 Best Sites Providing Free Books

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If you are a book lover and cannot afford to buy books to keep up with you reading, if you are a student who needs a truckload of textbooks every semester, if you are looking for essays pertaining to your research, or if you want to stay updated in your line of work, you need to turn to the internet to find those elusive volumes.

Here are 10 of the best sites for finding all sorts of books and reading them for free.

1.  Scribd

Scribd has a fantastic collection of reading materials of all kinds: books by famous authors, classics, presentations, textbooks, popular reading, and much more, organized by topic for easy access. Scribd is one of the web’s biggest and most comprehensive sources of published content, with over millions of documents published every month.

2. Wikibooks

Wikibooks is a product of the Wikimedia Foundation, alongside the ever popular Wikipedia. First launched in 2003 with the intention of gathering together the best free reference style works into one location on the web, it is today an open collection of a substantial number of factual textbooks, covering a huge range of subjects such as Languages, Physics, Accountancy, Mathematics, Palaeontology, and whatever other subject you need information in. Wikibooks does not have much of a selection in fiction, but as far as reference and textbooks go, it is a one stop site for all your requirements. Be sure to check out the Featured Books section, which highlights books that the Wikibooks community at large believes to be “the best of what Wikibooks has to offer, and should inspire people to improve the quality of other books.”

3. Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg is the oldest library of ebooks on the web, having started way back in 1971. It is also now one of the largest and best known collections of ebooks, and an invaluable source of quality online literature and reference works. This website offers nearly 40,000 ebooks that can be downloaded in a wide variety of formats such as PDFs, MS Word documents, and Text. Most of the books here are in English, but there are other languages available too. The goal of Project Gutenberg has always been to keep everything simple and accessible for all, rather than pandering to the needs of one particular segment. For this reason, it is quite likely that you will find what you are seeking here, whether it be a classic work or an authoritative text book. If you already know what you are looking for, search the database by author name, title, language, or subjects. You can also check out the top 100 list to see what other people have been downloading.

4. The Open Library

The Open Library, a project of the the non-profit Internet Archive, has a lofty aim in view: One web page for every book ever published. There are over a million books here, all free, all available in PDF, ePub, Daisy, DjVu and ASCII text. If you want to search specifically for ebooks, you can check the  ”show only ebooks” box under the main search box. Once you’ve found an ebook, you can select which format you want it in from the available range Also, if you have any ebooks of your own, you can donate to this site with the add a book feature.

5. Free-eBooks.net

The Free-eBooks site offers a wonderfully diverse variety of books, ranging from Advertising to Health to Web Design. You do have to register and become a member in order to download anything, but it only takes a minute, and besides, it’s free. As a member, you will have access to unlimited eBooks in HTML, but you can download only five books every month in the PDF and Txt formats. A VIP membership for a fee of $7.95 a month gives you unlimited access to any book you want, in any format. Because of the broad range of coverage, you can be certain to find a book here that will interest you. But because Free-Books.net has an open door policy of book collecting, the quality of the all-free offerings can be quite variable and you cannot always be sure that you are getting the best quality available. There is a good stock of copyright expired classics as well, that can have you browsing for hours.

6. ManyBooks.net

If you have a favorite book or author, you will probably be able to find what you are looking for at ManyBooks.net. This website offers more than 29,000 free books, sorted on the basis of authors, genres, and languages. Apart from English, ManyBooks offers titles in most other common languages like Spanish, Italian, French, and Swedish. The categories too are varied, ranging from Classics to Mystery to Biographies to Pirate stories, including an intriguing section on banned books.  You can spend hours browsing through the most popular downloads, recommendations, and special collections.

7. Questia Online Library

Scholars and librarians looking for research help often turn to the Questia Online Library as their first choice. Books ranging from classics to rarities also find a place in this 5000 odd collection. Books and essays are alphebetized by title and author for easy browsing. You can read online or download them for future reference.

8. The Literature Network

If fiction is what you are looking for, be sure to pay the Literature Network website a visit, and you can spend hours choosing titles from your favourite authors. Organized alphabetically by author name, this site is a delight for those who read for the love of reading. An added attraction is the detailed biography of each author that you can read as you wait for their books to download. Though most of the literature here is free, some downloads may require a small fee.

9. Librivox

If you are an audiobook lover, Librivox is a dream come true for you. Because of the usual high prices of audiobooks, all the free books here will come as a relief. With an army of  volunteers transcribing books in the public domain into the spoken word, Librivox can offer you whateer genre or author you’ve been looking for. You will also find classics translated into German, Italian, and French. This is a complete solution for those who enjoy hearing rather than reading books.

10. ReadPrint

ReadPrint was voted one of Time magazine’s best 50 websites in 2010, and you can easily see why. This website offers over 8000 free books, including novels, poems, fiction, nonfiction, essays, and plays in an easy to navigate format. An awesome feature is the search-by quote facility; in case you just can’t remember where you read a line that you loved. You have to register to download, but there are no fees charged for that. You can also participate in online bookclubs and discussions.

Other sites that are good for finding special types of books are Zillr (for Computer books) FreeComputerBooks (for computer books), FreeTechBooks (for engineering books), International Digital Children’s Library (for children’s books. This Library is organized by age, reading level, and more), Authorama (for books in HTML and XHTML format), Bibliomania (for book notes, summaries, study guides, and author biographies), and Sacred Text (for religious books)