Do you know that according to Oxford English Dictionary, the word used for a book lover is “bibliophile,” the word which was first recorded in print in 1824? Every bibliophile more than once in their lives has stood at the crossroads when they cannot afford to buy another book because unfortunately, we have to pay the bills and also eat something to stay alive. In such situations, we obviously turn to the Internet to help us through these difficult times.
Now, lucky for us, there are thousands of ebooks available in the digital world which are absolutely free and are available to be downloaded legally either because their copyright has expired, or their authors have chosen to release them without charge.
In any case, finding the right book online can be very challenging as many websites offer the facility to read online for users but downloading them, well, that is a whole different problem.
So for all the book lovers out there, we have tried to resolve this issue by compiling a list of the best websites from where you can download thousands of free, high-quality ebooks without any inconvenience. So if you are low on the budget this month, do check out our list:
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg offers an enormous archive that includes 53,000 books in EPUB, Kindle, plain text, and HTML. It is named after the printing press that democratized knowledge and is a wonderful source of free ebooks.
You can search for a specific title or go through their bookshelves via browsing a particular genre and can download any book directly, or you can have them sent it to your preferred cloud storage service including Dropbox, Google Drive, or Microsoft OneDrive.
Free-Ebooks.net
This platform offers a wide variety of hidden literary works as they offer the writings of many independent authors who want to avoid the traditional route and self-publish their books online.
All the ebooks available on this site are free and you can find a huge collection of new fiction, non-fiction, and even audiobooks in every genre. The ebooks are available as PDF, EPUB, Kindle, and plain text files where the user can sort results by publication date, popularity, or rating.
Kobo
Interestingly Kobo, the company’s name is an anagram of “book.” It offers a wide variety of books along with e-readers and reading the mobile application for book lovers. You can go to their website kobo.com and sign up via Google, Facebook, or Kobo accounts to access their library of ebooks.
If you have their e-reader, you do not need to download the ebooks but if not, you can easily download it onto your PC or any other device. The ebooks are mostly available in epub format and thus you may need to convert it to pdf online.
ManyBooks
ManyBooks is another such platform that provides ebooks for your PDA, iPod or eBook Reader free of cost. One of the exciting features of this website is its blog that offers some interesting insights and book recommendations based on the reader’s taste and persona.
It also shows the best books deals by other websites like Amazon, Barnes, and Noble, etc. where you can buy them for a fraction of their price. ManyBooks has a collection of over 33,000 free ebooks where one doesn’t need to sign up to avail of their services.
Feedbooks
Feedbooks is another cool website for book lovers that offer thousands of free public domain books including the best collection of classic novels.
The authors who want to avoid the hassle of publishing houses can easily self-publish their work on this website and let Feedbooks users evaluate it. Furthermore, it also lets you turn your favorite RSS Feeds into a PDF file to view later on your mobile device.
GetFreeBooks.com
Another great website to legally download ebooks is Get Free Books that also works as a self-publishing platform for young and upcoming authors. They offer a wide collection of free ebooks along with their interesting blog and informative videos that are available on their Youtube channel.
Planet Publish
For classic book lovers, Planet Publish is a haven as it offers a collection of classic novels all in PDF format. The website is user-friendly where users can just choose a book and download it to further divulge into its mysteries.
Wikibooks
Just like Wikipedia, this platform is entirely dedicated to sharing knowledge with others, thus, Wikibooks offers a collection of open-content textbooks, which anyone with expertise can edit.
You can easily search Wikibooks by topic and can download any page as PDF via a link that is available in the left-hand menu. A user can also collect and combine several pages, organize them and export them through a tool known as Collection Creator.
Amazon Cheap Reads for Kindle
Looking at the name, you might think that it’s Amazon, and they never offer anything for free, but sorry you’re wrong this time.
Despite its name, the website offers free ebooks to its users to download and enjoy the literary works of famous authors. Unlike many other sites on this list, Amazon Cheap Reads for Kindle are organized through a rating system so they can bring the best books from their archives to the user’s screen.
On the downside, the free ebooks are only available in Kindle format meaning that the users of other ebook readers will need to convert the files. Also, in order to download these books, one must be logged into their Amazon account.
Goodreads
Many of you out there would be familiar with Goodreads, a social cataloging website founded in December 2006 which provides tons of services to bibliophiles around the world.
The users can sign up and register books to generate library catalogs and reading lists and can interact with other people to discuss the literature by creating their own groups of book suggestions, surveys/polls, blogs, and discussions.
If you’re a Goodreads user, you might think I am crazy to include this site in the list of those which offer free ebooks but sadly, you’re wrong. This website offers not all but a few books that can be downloaded whereas a few others we can read online.
