Friday, November 12, 2010

The Best 6 Sites to Get Free Ebooks

1. Ebook Search Engines

These are simple Google-like search engines but for PDF files. I usually start my ebook search using one of these sites. Type in the title of the document or book name you’re looking for and click on the search button. Find your book in the search results and click on download link. Done.
Free PDF Ebooks Search Engine
So far my top 3 ebook search sites are:

2. Scribd.com

In case you have never heard of this one before, the simplest way to define Scribd would be to call it Youtube for documents. People can upload whatever text documents they want and easily share them with others.
Scribd - Free Ebook Sharing and Download Site
You’ll find lots and lots of free ebooks here. You only need to know what to look for. For instance try searching for George Orwell, Leo Tolstoi, etc.
And obviously it gets copyrighted ebooks much like YouTube gets copyrighted videos. I am not sure if they are doing anything to deal with them, but the fact is there are plenty of them on Scribd.
Oh and as we have mentioned before, Scribd is also an excellent resource for free document templates.

3. Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg (aka PG) has the largest collection of public domain books. These are the books that out of copyright and available for anyone to use for any purpose. Lots of books from the world’s greatest fiction authors such as Dickens, Joyce, Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Anton Chekov and Edgar Allan Poe fall into this category.
This site is the oldest producer of free ebooks on the Internet. PG is an extremely popular site and now has over 20,000 works. If you’re not sure where to start check out their Top 100 page.
free ebook downloads

4. Free Ebooks For Your iPod, PDA, Smartphone, Blackberry etc.

For those of you who like to have ebooks on their portabe device we got some sites as well. Below are what I believe the best websites for books that can be read on mobile devices.
For iPhone users in particular there is a website called TextOnPhne. It’s a great ebook site that comes with its own ebook reader app. There are over 30,000 free books for your Apple device. Check out the demo video here.

5. Free Tech Ebooks

These sites are mainly for tech books, covering everything from computer science, engineering and mathematics to programming and web development.

(Bonus) DailyLit

DailyLit is a bit different from the rest but I really like what they’re doing there. DailyLit can deliver a small excerpt from the book of your choice to your email on a daily basis. One excerpt per day, and so untill the book is finished.
The reason it wroks so well is that it only takes around 3-5 minutes to read each excerpt. If you feel like reading more you can request a next excerpt with a click of a button.
DailyLit- free ebook site

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