Advertisement Book lovers all over the world are starting to wake up and smell the coffee: Modern e-readers hold thousands of novels, weigh next to nothing, have built in lights, and don't give you a concussion when they hit your nose. The benefits are many, like not having to lug around a 10-pound doorstop, being able to bring your whole library with you everywhere, and backing up your entire library to the cloud. But if you’re a voracious reader, buying ebook after ebook can burn a huge hole in your wallet. One option is to subscribe to an There are slim pickings for those who want an all-you-can-eat service for eBooks, with Scribd and Kindle Unlimited the only two offerings left. So, which deserves your hard-earned cash? That grants access to an entire library of ebooks for a monthly membership of just a few dollars. The other option is to save your money and switch to freely available ebooks instead. You’d be surprised how many ebooks you can get without paying a cent, and that applies to both fiction and non-fiction. Where can you find these free ebooks? Well, we’re glad you asked 1. When BookZZ claims to be “the world’s largest ebook library,” it’s not kidding. It currently plays host to over 2.7 million ebooks as well as 52.4 million scientific articles from publications all over the world — it would take several lifetimes to consume everything on offer. BookZZ has both fiction and non-fiction, spanning different genres (e.g. Science fiction, fantasy, thrillers, romance) and types (e.g. There are many different ways to download ebooks for free, legally, for your computer, mobile device, tablet or laptop. I know that I enjoy reading a lot of content and while I spend a substantial amount of money every month to buy ebooks, I enjoy getting some of them for free as well. When you tell your friends you download. The world's leading online source of ebooks, with a vast range of ebooks from academic, popular and professional publishers. Novels, comics, essays, textbooks). It’s nothing short of impressive. The books can be browsed in two ways: by category (of which there are 27 major categories and hundreds of minor categories) or by recently added (which isn’t terribly useful in my experience). The browsing interface is a bit messy, but it gets the job done. Or you can use the search option, which lets you search by title, author, description, and more. The Advanced Search lets you narrow the results by year, language, and format (e.g. PDF, EPUB, MOBI, DOC). You’ll never run out of things to read here. BookZZ is actually a mirror for LibGen, or Library Genesis, but we prefer BookZZ because its interface is less clunky and a bit easier to navigate. Project Gutenberg is a charity endeavor, sustained through volunteers and fundraisers, that aims to collect and provide as many high-quality ebooks as possible. Most of its library consists of public domain titles, but it has other stuff too if you’re willing to look around. As of this writing, Gutenberg has over 53,000 free ebooks on offer. They are available for download in EPUB and MOBI formats (some are only available in one of the two) or they can be read online in HTML format. You can browse the library by category (of which there are hundreds), by most popular (which means total download count), by latest (which means date of upload), or by random (which is a great way to find new material to read). Because it’s a charity, Gutenberg subsists on donations. If you appreciate what they’re doing, please consider by PayPal, Flattr, check, or money order. Feedbooks is a massive collection of downloadable ebooks, both fiction and non-fiction, both public domain and copyrighted, both free and paid. As of this writing, over 1 million titles are available, but only a portion of them are free. The split between “free public domain ebooks” and “free original ebooks” is surprisingly even. A big chunk of the public domain titles are short stories whereas a big chunk of the original titles are fanfiction, but don’t let that turn you away — you can find some great stuff here otherwise. Most of the ebooks are available in EPUB, MOBI, and PDF formats. They even come with word counts and reading time estimates, in case you take that into consideration when choosing what to read. ManyBooks is a nifty little site that’s been around for over a decade. Its purpose is to curate and provide a library of free and discounted fiction ebooks for people to download and enjoy. Much of its collection was seeded by Project Gutenberg back in the mid-2000s, but has since taken on an identity of its own with the addition of thousands of self-published works that have been made available at no charge. The browsing interface has a lot of room to improve, but it’s simple enough to use. ![]() Downloads are available in dozens of formats, including EPUB, MOBI, and PDF, and each story has a Flesch-Kincaid score to show how easy or difficult it is to read ( Learning English can be tricky. Grammar is one of the stumbling blocks. These five Udemy classes will help you speak and write English with better fluency.). ![]() Unlike the other sites on this list, Centsless Books is a curator-aggregator of Kindle books available on Amazon. Its mission is to make it easy for you to stay on top of all the free ebooks available from the online retailer. Note that some of the “free” ebooks listed on Centsless Books are only free if you’re part of the Kindle Unlimited program, Amazon's rumored 'Netflix for books' service is finally here: Kindle Unlimited. In theory, it sounds fantastic. But is it all that it is hyped up to be? Consider signing up to the free Centsless Books email newsletter to receive update notices for newly free ebooks and giveaways. The newsletter is only sent out on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, so it won’t spam you up too much. Centsless Books also has a separate, which you may prefer if you’re from across the pond and tend to use Amazon UK instead. ![]() Please bear in mind that as Centsless Books tracks free ebooks available on Amazon, there may be times when there is nothing listed. The only option is to try again in a few days. Between the three major ebook formats — EPUB, MOBI, and PDF — it’s quite possible that you prefer the latter. You wouldn’t be the first, and you won’t be the last. PDFs have a lot going for them, including near universal support across platforms and several Did you think twice before you installed Adobe Reader? It's the most widely used PDF reader, but not necessarily the best. We went out to find the best PDF readers for your needs. If you want to stick to PDFs only, then you’ll want to check out PDFBooksWorld. It’s far from the largest ebook collection out there (a little over 1,000 titles at the time of writing) but they’re all free and all guaranteed to be PDF-optimized. Note that you’ll need to create an account to use this site. How Else Do You Get Free Ebooks? In addition to the above, don’t forget about Amazon Prime! It now comes with Prime Reading offers Amazon Prime subscribers unlimited access to more than 1,000 eBooks, magazines, short stories, comic books, and more. All for free., which grants access to thousands of contemporary ebooks in addition to all of the Scratch the surface. Amazon Prime has so many more benefits that people have forgotten about or simply don't realize exist. If you’re already paying for a Prime membership, then these ebooks are essentially free. But if you don’t have Prime and don’t care about the other benefits, it may be hard to justify. One last note: now that you have a bunch of ebooks waiting to be read, you’ll want to make sure you use a solid ebook reader whether you intend to Windows is establishing itself as a cross-platform operating system. It's already running on tablets and 2-in-1 devices, making eBook reader applications for the desktop more relevant than ever. Or Amazon has its own set of flaws that send readers looking for an alternative that’s just as good. Looking to get away from Amazon, the Kindle, and DRM? Here are some of the best ebook. Which sites do you find the most useful? Are there any other ways to get free ebooks that we overlooked? Share your thoughts with us down in the comments! Image Credit: via Flickr. PCMag reviews products, but we may earn affiliate commissions from buying links on this page.. The Amazon Kindle is a great, but it's tightly tied to Amazon's ecosystem. If you have a Fire tablet or a smartphone, you can download other e-reading apps to beef up your library, but with the E Ink Kindles (including the, the, and the ), you're pretty much tied to getting your content directly from Amazon. Well, sort of. Using a bit of free software, you can take ebooks in the EPUB, Mobi, and PDF formats and zap them over to your Kindle lickety-split. Here's how to do it. Email The easiest way to put books on your Kindle is to do it via email. To get your Kindle's email address, go to using your PC's Web browser. Tap on 'Your Devices,' then choose the relevant Kindle from the gallery below. Next to 'Email,' you'll find the Kindle's email address. Now click 'Settings' and scroll all the way down to the 'approved personal document e-mail list.' Click 'add a new approved e-mail address,' and add the email address you intend to send your books from. Remember, your Kindle needs to be attached to a Wi-Fi or 3G network for this to work. It doesn't have to be your home network, of course; you can go to a coffee shop or a public library, for instance. Mobi Format Good news: If your books are in the Mobi format, they're already readable by the Kindle. Attach the.mobi file to an email, send it to your Kindle's email address (with any subject, and no body in the email), and it should appear on your Kindle shortly. You can also drag and drop the file onto your Kindle if you attach the device to your PC with a USB cable. PDF Format Amazon can automatically convert PDFs into the Kindle format, but you get two formatting choices. If you want your Kindle to display every page in the PDF as if it were a graphic, just email the.pdf file to your Kindle's address without a subject line. That will maintain the formatting and graphics, but the font size may be too small to read. If you're OK with this kind of formatting, you can also drag and drop the file onto your Kindle if you attach the device to your PC with a USB cable. Your other option is to attach the.pdf file to an email, and make the subject line 'convert' —just that word. Send it to your Kindle email address and your PDF will be converted into a Mobi file, where you can control the font size and formatting. The graphics will still be in there as well, but you'll lose the layout of the original PDF. EPUB Format EPUB is a common ebook format around the Web, but the Kindle can't read it natively. That's OK; you can convert.epub files to Mobi files for the Kindle to read. The key is a free piece of software called. Calibre can reformat almost any kind of ebook for almost any ebook reader, although cracking the copy protection on books purchased from Amazon or certain other stores is forbidden. Once you set up Calibre, click on 'Add books,' and pick out the free ebook files you've downloaded. They'll appear in the Calibre library. Now click on an entry in your Calibre library and choose 'convert books' from the top bar. In the upper right hand corner, make sure the 'output format' is 'MOBI.' Click OK, and wait until the 'Jobs' number at the lower right of the main screen goes from 1 down to 0. Now select the title again and click 'Save to disk.' Pick the folder you want to save it in. It'll create a subfolder with the name of the author. In Explorer or Finder, drill into that folder until you find the juicy Mobi file within, which you can email to your Kindle or drag and drop onto it using a USB cable. So Where Do I Get Free Ebooks? There are lots of places to get. Calibre actually has a good 'get books' metasearch function, but you need to know exactly what you're looking for; it's not for browsing. If you belong to a U.S. Public library, try downloading the Overdrive Media Console. Available for both Windows and Mac PCs, it hooks into public library catalogs and lets you download Kindle books through Amazon. You can find your library's Overdrive Web site at, and the Overdrive. If you want classics, a great place to start is. Project Gutenberg, which has been around basically as long as the Internet, has nearly 50,000 copyright-free ebooks. Has even more downloadable books; it also has a lending system that doesn't work with Kindles. For historical and academic texts, check out. Has about 2,500 more recent free books available, and they're even mostly in Mobi format. Mixes classics and self-published titles, with around 30,000 in its library. You'll find more classics and self-published works. There's also, but frankly, the stuff up there looks really awful. (Not dishonest or anything, just bad books.) If you like science fiction, the publisher also has a set of free ebooks. Some bookstores use copy protection that doesn't work with Kindles. Unfortunately, that's the case for Google Books, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble. Also, remember, text files and Word documents can be emailed to your Kindle, too! Just send them to your Kindle's email address and enjoy. PCMag.com's lead mobile analyst, Sascha Segan, has reviewed hundreds of smartphones, tablets and other gadgets in more than 13 years with PCMag. He's the head of our Fastest Mobile Networks project, hosts our One Cool Thing daily Web show, and writes opinions on tech and society. Segan is also a multiple award-winning travel writer. Other than his home town of New York, his favorite cities are Barcelona and Hong Kong. While he's a fourth-generation Manhattanite, he now lives in Queens with his wife and daughter.
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