Home › Departments › Library › e-book sites

e-book sites

 

Information on where to find eBooks, cited from 'School Librarian' Volume 59, number 2, Summer 2011...

As well as the eBooks which are commercial available, there are also thousands of ‘free' eBooks available online; some are free because they are out of copyright, some are self-published, some are intended to draw the reader onto make future purchases. This brief round-up identifies some sites which are useful in locating free eBooks.

http://www.gliffy.com/publish/2059164/ is a very useful flowchart - choose your device, see what app or software you will need, which formats it will support and find out where to buy books and get help.

http://www.howtogeek.com/58500/how-to-find-thousands-of-free-ebooks-online/ as it says, a clearly laid out round-up of sites where you can acquire legal free eBooks.
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page Project Gutenberg is the original eBook site, enabling computer users to read books online before handheld eReaders were even invented! 100,000 books free to read online, 33,000 of which can be downloaded in ePub, Kindle, HTML or plain text formats. The books are copyright free in the US, readers in other countries must follow their own countries law.

http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/ John Ockerbloom's site, one of the very early sites listing eBooks. Mainly on-line texts but some are downloadable.

http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/ is Mary Mark Ockerbloom's companion site. As the name, A Celebration of Women Writers, implies, it identifies a particular subset of books and through the Speciality Collections also links to bibliographies, criticism and further information.

http://inkmesh.com/ is an eBook search service which allows you to find titles and compare prices. A simple search box allows you to look for specific titles or authors and you can specify free eBooks. Results tell you the devices for which the eBook is available give a description of the book and link you to sites where it can be obtained. You can also browse books by subject or find free promotional titles by device.

http://www.manybooks.net/ claims to have 29,000 free eBooks. It has simple and advanced search, or you can browse by author, title, genre or language. There are readers' recommendations, special collections e.g. books to read before you die or Pulitzer Prize winners or audio books and a fascinating Series section listing titles in order. This would be my preferred eBook finder.

Of course the majority of free eBooks are classics, long out of print, but the ‘added value' of being able to search, bookmark and sometimes annotate an electronic version still makes them worth acquiring. And the format may tempt some to read books they would not otherwise have tried.