Free ebook sources

[elf]

My husband got a Sony PRS-300 a couple of weeks ago, and when he showed it off to his friends (loaded with public domain mysteries and crime novels), he found out that some of them have no idea where to get ebooks other than Amazon. While I tend to think people at DW are more aware of internet resources & how to find them, that doesn't mean they've had time to go looking for sources of free ebooks.

Lists
http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Free_eBooks has lists of dozens of free ebook sites, both downloadable and read-online ebooks.

http://www.teleread.org/free-ebooks/ is Teleread's list of free ebook resources.

Academic: free textbooks & other educational resources are listed at http://www.textbooksfree.org/ (A lot of these are PDFs and won't work well on small ebook readers.)

Sources
http://www.gutenberg.org stocks US public domain books; http://gutenberg.net.au/ stocks ones that are PD in Australia, which includes authors who died before 1955.

Some of the largest public domain-etc. spots are:
http://www.munseys.com
http://www.feedbooks.com
http://www.manybooks.net

Baen Books has a free library of science fiction ebooks at http://www.baen.com/library/

Sci-fi author & copyfight activist Cory Doctorow releases all of his books as free ebooks at http://craphound.com/ (No one spot for downloads; they're listed under each title's subsection.)

http://girlebooks.com/ has books by female authors only; mostly free public domain.

Creative Commons booklist (incomplete): http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Books
Some of the links don't work, or the books are no longer findable online; I'm including it because it's one of the few listings of nonfiction ebooks.

http://www.smashwords.com is a self-published ebook store, but it has a lot of free and "pay what you like" books.

Other ebooks, not really suitable for ereaders:
http://www.wowio.com has a large selection of ebooks that are free to read online, and cost to download as PDFs. (They have some freebies, which are mostly public domain excerpts, and one featured free download per month.)

http://goldenagecomics.co.uk/ and http://digitalcomicmuseum.com/ have free public domain comics in CBR or CBZ format. There's a lot of overlap in content between the two sites, but having an account on each lets people download more before running into their server limits.

At some point, I'll put together something on romance/erotica sites, almost all of which have some free ebooks.

Comments

[rebecca2525]

I got an ereader last week, so I appreciate this very much! Thanks!

[dragonfly]

Thank you!

[scribblesinink]

Thank you! I feel like a kid in a candy store. When am I ever gonna have time to read all these books...?

[jumpuphigh]

Awesome! There are a few sites I hadn't seen before. Thank you.

[adair]

Thanks - I knew about some of these, but by no means all. I'm passing the list along to a couple of other people who have Nooks. Amazon and Kindle get all the media attention, so a lot of people thing that's the only ebook source.

[yourlibrarian]

Handy list, thanks.

[afuna]

Thank you! I see a happy weekend of exploring in front of me *grin*

Also, re: the difference between gutenberg and gutenberg.au, that explains why I could only get Lovecraft from the latter, but not the former. I was wondering about that!

And re: Baen
There's an unofficial site which shares the ebooks from the CDs that BAEN puts out in their books (also free / legal). It's not the same as the free library, though there's a substantial overlap.