In this article, we will see 25+ websites to download free ebooks. These could be used to simply READ ebooks for leisure, to learn and to expand our knowledge, OR We can also use some of the websites given here to get your public domain ebooks that are sometimes totally FREE to even publish on Kindle.
I have obviously not included famous ones like the Project Gutenberg as many already know about that website. So, stay till the end of this video to find out some new websites along with a bonus website at the end.
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1 ebooklobby.com
ebooklobby.com has a humble collection with ebooks categorized into different types such as art, fashion, graphic design, photography, finance, biographies, computers, entertainment, and many others. They also have a section that shows Top 10 ebooks categorized into various sections.
2 bookspics.com
bookspics.com – This website claims to have 275 thousand + books available to download. They have a pretty good collection of books, except that they aren’t categorized for easy identification.
3 planetpublish.com
planetpublish.com – This is a pretty minimalistic website with a neat collection of classic books such as the Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Jungle Book, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, etc, all available in PDF format ready to download.
4 Librivox.org
Librivox is a website that offers a free collection of Public Domain Audiobooks. This will be loved by people who don’t have time to “read” books but can find time to listen to books through audiobooks. Simply click on their ‘catalog’ and find hundreds of audiobooks, ready to be downloaded, which can also be filtered either by Author, Title, Genre, or Language. A little word of caution here: although these audio books are claimed to be in the Public domain, they are so in the U.S.A. please verify the copyright status of these works in your own country before downloading, otherwise you may be violating copyright laws.
5 free-ebooks.net
Free ebooks dot net is a website that has a HUGE collection of books that are available to download in PDF, Kindle format, text or ePub formats. These downloads are available only after we register with them, which is FREE of course. Go ahead and check it out.
6 freetechbooks.com
This site lists free online computer science, engineering and programming books, textbooks and lecture notes, all of which are legally and freely available over the Internet. All the books listed in this site are freely available, as they are hosted on websites that belong to the authors or the publishers. In other wordS, they don’t host the books but simply provide links to the books in PDF or HTML format available at the authors or the publishers websites.
7 freecomputerbooks.com
Everything on this website is 100% Free. This includes books, lecture notes, magazines, white papers, tutorials and much more.
FreeComputerBooks.com consists of a huge collection of Free online Computer, Programming, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technical Books, which are well categorized by topics, with 13 top-level categories, and over 200 sub-categories. It has both pattern and keywords search engines for you to find the titles quickly.
The key highlights on this website are that most of the books are links to other ‘LIVE’ websites where the books don’t go out-dated as they are all maintained as current and latest by their respective owners.
The other thing is that they even have some books by OReilly publishers, some Mobile computing books where one can find great books on Android Development, iOS programming, etc. Go ahead and start learning coz your “imagination” is the only limit here!
8 gitbook.com
Now this one is my favorite. GitBook was created mid-2014 with the vision of creating a modern and simple solution to documentation, digital writing, and publishing. Since then, they’ve grown to help more than 250,000 people working together into writing 150,000 books served to 20M visitors every month.
To begin, just go to gitbook.com and click on the ‘Explore’ menu then choose a tag that interests you. For e.g. ‘Web development’ brings up these results. Let’s say we go ahead and choose the latest version of “Front-end Developer Handbook 2018” – as you can see these are updated just a few days ago! Let me show you a demo of how and what this book covers.
9 Onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu
An online repository of books maintained by a digital library planner and researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, this is a plain vanilla HTML site but has a great collection of books and is quite organized when we consider the fact that it’s just maintained by 1 or 2 people! Just go ahead and navigate through the hyperlinks given on their homepage to browse through the site by titles, subjects, listings and more.
10 openlibrary.org
Open library is just what it says – an open library, that hosts a huge list of ebooks waiting to be read. It has all the classics and some contemporary books. You can use its search fields to search for books or authors. When ready to read, it has a great book design format that opens right on the screen where we can start reading right away.
11 Google Play books
Next in our list is a little different one. Google Play books. This has the option of either reading on our Android phones or directly on the web browser. I have provided a link to it in the show notes that takes you directly to the Top Free section where you can download hundreds and thousands of ebooks that are mostly short and crisp in their subjects.
12 knowfree.Tradepub.com
As the top destination for the latest research and publications, TradePub.com publishes curated resources on behalf of the world’s largest and most influential companies. The TradePub.com research library is #1 resource for professionals to access free research, white papers, reports, case studies, magazines, and eBooks. Professionals are eligible to sign up for a free TradePub.com Membership to enjoy unlimited access to the TradePub.com resource library including On-the-go access to all materials regardless of device or browser with unlimited access to the complete TradePub library.
13 Amazon Cheap Reads for Kindle
Now, this is not a famous website… wait, I am just kidding here. Amazon, as you might not expect, has tons of FREE ebooks to be downloaded. It has a great list of books organized as per categories when you use this special link available in the show notes below. Want to read free romance novels, or mystery, thriller and suspense, or just a classic book or a science fiction, it’s all in here. Just go ahead and get your Kindle apps, if you don’t have a Kindle device or simply read them on your web browser by going to read.amazon.com.
14 feedbooks.com/publicdomain
Feedbooks – The caption itself promises to provide 1000s of public domain books at the outset. With categories ranging from short stories, fantasy, romance, to the harvard classics shelf of fiction – there are two broad shelves where all these books are kept in – fiction and non-fiction. Ranging from Dante’s Divine comedy, the adventures of Sherlock holmes, Treasure island, Around the world in 80 days, and much more, you can find them all in here.
15 Goodreads
Goodreads – This is not an ebook download site per se but it has a curated list of information about books that are in the public domain. Now people who are into re-publishing public domain books with either an annotation, or illustration, or translation into Amazon’s KDP will find this TREASURE a HUGE help. This has books categorized into various shelves with some even tagged as ‘before 1923’, as you can see here on the screen.
16 ebooks.adelaide.edu.au
This is again a website funded and maintained by a university, The University of Adelaide in Australia. It has a decent collection of books categorized into all these subjects. Although the site design is not that intuitive or great, it does have some neat content and a collection of FREE ebooks worth checking out.
Anthropology
Archaeology
Art
Biography
Books
Economics
Exploration and travel
Fiction
Gastronomy
History
Law
Literature
Medicine
Myth and Fable
Philosophy
Politics
Psychology
Religion
Science
17 LoyalBooks.com
Now, this website is a feast for all readers. And that’s an understatement. It has a GREAT collection of books categorized into various topics, along with providing ebooks for download in various formats from kindle Mobi to pdf to an audiobook. Thus the options are plenty and no excuse for us NOT to read. This website seems to be dedicated to making all free books available to us through this enormous catalog of collections; no wonder it doesn’t surprise when we see that loyalbooks was known as ooksShouldBeFree.com earlier.
18 GRTBooks.com
If you are not just a reader of books but also a collector, this site has many surprises in it. Classics, I mean, age-old scripts are available in this site such as Upanishads, and other sacred texts that goes back to 200 BC and earlier. Works of Plato, Hippocrates, Sun-Tzu, Aristotle, Thiruvalluvar, and The Vedas, Ramayana can all be found in this remarkable HTML-only website. Go Indulge!
19 Wikisource
Wikisource – We all might have heard about Wikipedia, but there is another similar source for getting free books to read and that’s Wikisource. Captioned as ‘a free library that anyone can improve’, it’s another free source for people who are looking to publish public domain books into KDP as almost all the books given here are cited with their publishing year, and many can be found that are published in the 19th century.
20 Baen
http://www.baen.com/catalog/category/view/s/free-library/id/2012
Baen Books is now making available a number of its titles in electronic format, for FREE. They’re calling it the Baen Free Library. Anyone who wishes can read these titles online — no conditions, no strings attached. Or, if you prefer, you can download the books in one of several formats. Again, with no conditions or strings attached. (URLs to sites which offer the readers for these format are also listed. )
Bonus: Now here’s a bonus website: This page from getFreeEbooks has a compilation of many topic-wise ebooks for any kind of reader. https://www.getfreeebooks.com/category/top-compilations/
There are more websites that were worth a mention, but for which I wasn’t sure of the copyrights involved. Go ahead and check all of them in the show notes below.
More websites worth mentioning:
http://www.freebookcentre.net
http://www.freebookspot.com/Catalogue.aspx
http://ebook3000.info/Default
https://www.bookgoldmine.com
https://bygosh.com
As you can see, there is no shortage of websites that let you download and read books for free.
If not already done, make up your mind to start reading to become better in anything you are doing. Readers are, definitely Leaders. If not for others, this at least can help you “lead” a better life.