Tag Archives: project gutenberg

eBooks – Where to find them

In our last ebook post, let’s look at the many places to find ebooks online. Across the web, you can find ebooks for free and for pay, major bestsellers and independent works. Some authors give away ebooks and entice you to buy print, others charge for their ebooks and never print a page. You can find millions of digitized books from research collections around the world, or the latest from your favorite author. It’s all out there.

Through Your App

Whatever ereader or ereader app you’re using, there is a way to search for content directly through it. It might be as simple as using the search bar at the top of the screen, or it might take a little more doing.

Read through the instructions or manual for your device or app and find the section on Searching. Here are Help pages from a few of the more popular services:

Free on the Web

These are some of the many resources for finding free, often out-of-copyright books online.

  • Project Gutenberg is one of the oldest and most comprehensive sites for free ebooks online. In many ways, it has set the standard for public domain ebook sharing.
  • Overdrive is the downloadable media resource used by many public libraries around the country. This example is from the Boston Public Library, and you can look at your library’s website to see if they offer ebooks for download. You do need a library card for that library to download ebooks from them.
  • The Ebooks and Texts section of Archive.org. Includes out-of-copyright books from many research libraries worldwide.
  • OpenLibrary – an open, editable online library hoping to provide a web page for every book ever written.
  • GoogleBooks offers access to millions of books, either to preview or read entirely for free
  • WikiBooks is an open-content textbook collection
  • Authors like Cory Doctorow and James Boyle let readers download their ebooks for free. Find your favorite author’s website and see if they offer free excerpts or whole books there.
  • The Baen Free Library – a collection of free ebooks from science fiction and fantasy publisher Baen Books. The publisher of your favorite books may also offer some for free – check them out.

  • Many of the for-purchase sites listed below also offer free ebooks or free excerpts/samples. See if they have something you can try before you buy.

For Purchase on the Web

There are hundreds of other sources for ebooks and the easiest way to find a title you’re looking for is to search for that title plus “ebook” in your favorite search engine and see what comes up.

Next week, we’ll take a quick look at the idea of copyright, public domain and Creative Commons licenses on the web, and what that means for what you find to read, watch and listen to online.
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