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Read an Ebook Week: Mar 7-13
March 7-13 is Read an Ebook Week and there's a contest and free ebooks and whatnot at the ebookweek.com site. (Click; read. Try not to think too much about the tiny white text on blue background; presumably, it looks professional or something. Firefox has Ctrl-plus to let the font get big enough to read; yay.)
I thought I'd list some free ebook sources so people can go find an ebook or a dozen to read.
Mobileread's Free Ebooks page has lists of dozens of free ebook sites, both downloadable and read-online ebooks. (Lots. Lots and lots and lots. Mygods, you can read Shakespeare in dozens of badly-formatted filetypes. While I dearly love Project Gutenberg, I get twitchy every time a new booksite opens with a feed from them.)
The Baen Free Library has science fiction ebooks in several formats, and the Fifth Imperium hosts the Baen CD collection that are released in the hardcovers. Many of those are series that are not part of the free library--if you get them from the Baen site, you have to pay for them. But Baen, believing that customers are nifty people, liberally sprinkles the web with freebies. (They figure that if you get hooked on a series, you'll buy the next one when it comes out. Or buy a print edition for a friend.)
Golden Age Comics has free public-domain comics in CBR or CBZ format. (I use Comical to read them.)
Sci-fi author & copyfight activist Cory Doctorow releases all of his books as free ebooks. I recommend Little Brother (teen rebel novel), Content (about the copyfight wars), and Makers (which is *screaming* for fanfic).
Teleread has a list of free ebook resources.
Wowio has a large selection of ebooks that are free to read online, and cost to download as PDFs. (They used to be free to download, up to 3/day, and I have several from back then.)
Smashwords is a self-published ebook store (lulu for ebooks!), and it has a lot of free and "pay what you like" books. I recommend people with Kindles check out Smashwords--sometimes, authors release the same books in both places, and Smashwords gets the cheaper ones because Amazon doesn't allow $1 ebooks or "pay what you like."
Harlequin is having its 60th anniversary, and has released a cluster of ebooks for free. (I like the Blaze, and the Intrigue was okay. If I'd had the Nocturne in physical form, I'd've thrown it against the wall. Harlequin should stay away from the occult.) Ignore the titles; Harlequin ran out of non-ridiculous book titles several decades ago.
Feedbooks.com has lots of public domain & creative commons ebooks, including a decent collection of DC2 fanfic comics, which have been reformatted into easy-to-read books at Feedbooks. (Search for DC2.) I like feedbooks better than manybooks.net because it's got better formatting, and is available in custom-sized PDFs so I can get them to exactly fit my reader; manybooks has a wider selection of public domain. (Uncorrected gutenberg feeds. Which means plain text only and sometimes weird line breaks.)
Mobileread itself has thousands of hand-formatted free ebooks; if you're looking for public domain ebooks, start here--these are the good ones. (And the reason so many of us are contemptuous of mainstream publishers' ebooks; we've seen what quality formatting looks like.) And fairly often, the formatter (or someone else) is willing to tweak it to your preferences if you know what you'd like.
Happy reading!
I thought I'd list some free ebook sources so people can go find an ebook or a dozen to read.
Mobileread's Free Ebooks page has lists of dozens of free ebook sites, both downloadable and read-online ebooks. (Lots. Lots and lots and lots. Mygods, you can read Shakespeare in dozens of badly-formatted filetypes. While I dearly love Project Gutenberg, I get twitchy every time a new booksite opens with a feed from them.)
The Baen Free Library has science fiction ebooks in several formats, and the Fifth Imperium hosts the Baen CD collection that are released in the hardcovers. Many of those are series that are not part of the free library--if you get them from the Baen site, you have to pay for them. But Baen, believing that customers are nifty people, liberally sprinkles the web with freebies. (They figure that if you get hooked on a series, you'll buy the next one when it comes out. Or buy a print edition for a friend.)
Golden Age Comics has free public-domain comics in CBR or CBZ format. (I use Comical to read them.)
Sci-fi author & copyfight activist Cory Doctorow releases all of his books as free ebooks. I recommend Little Brother (teen rebel novel), Content (about the copyfight wars), and Makers (which is *screaming* for fanfic).
Teleread has a list of free ebook resources.
Wowio has a large selection of ebooks that are free to read online, and cost to download as PDFs. (They used to be free to download, up to 3/day, and I have several from back then.)
Smashwords is a self-published ebook store (lulu for ebooks!), and it has a lot of free and "pay what you like" books. I recommend people with Kindles check out Smashwords--sometimes, authors release the same books in both places, and Smashwords gets the cheaper ones because Amazon doesn't allow $1 ebooks or "pay what you like."
Harlequin is having its 60th anniversary, and has released a cluster of ebooks for free. (I like the Blaze, and the Intrigue was okay. If I'd had the Nocturne in physical form, I'd've thrown it against the wall. Harlequin should stay away from the occult.) Ignore the titles; Harlequin ran out of non-ridiculous book titles several decades ago.
Feedbooks.com has lots of public domain & creative commons ebooks, including a decent collection of DC2 fanfic comics, which have been reformatted into easy-to-read books at Feedbooks. (Search for DC2.) I like feedbooks better than manybooks.net because it's got better formatting, and is available in custom-sized PDFs so I can get them to exactly fit my reader; manybooks has a wider selection of public domain. (Uncorrected gutenberg feeds. Which means plain text only and sometimes weird line breaks.)
Mobileread itself has thousands of hand-formatted free ebooks; if you're looking for public domain ebooks, start here--these are the good ones. (And the reason so many of us are contemptuous of mainstream publishers' ebooks; we've seen what quality formatting looks like.) And fairly often, the formatter (or someone else) is willing to tweak it to your preferences if you know what you'd like.
Happy reading!