(Psst: The FTC wants me to remind you that this website contains affiliate links. That means if you make a purchase from a link you click on, I might receive a small commission. This does not increase the price you’ll pay for that item nor does it decrease the awesomeness of the item. ~ Daisy)
Being a bibliophile can be a very expensive habit, and if you’re finding that your quest for story and knowledge is eating a hole through your wallet, there’s hope from the world of eBooks. There’s a host of free eBooks out there – you just have to know where to look.
Some unscrupulous sites steal books that are under copyright and offer them for free. When looking for free ebooks make sure that the book is actually open-source. Otherwise, you’re taking money out of the author’s pocket and writing a book is hard work for which they deserve to be paid.
Without further ado, here are our top recommendations for where to begin your hunt for your next eBook on the cheap.
Apple Book Store
There’s a little bit of everything here, and you most certainly learn a lot about the patterns of your society by examining the current top 100 books. For example, you’ll learn that books with bare-chested cowboys on the cover seem to have quite the following.
A lot more is present here than just that however, and if you’re looking for something from a company you already have a login for, the Apple Book Store is there.
Archive.org
You can find literally just about anything here, and I’ve found it’s particularly useful for hard-to-find, older titles that have long since gone out of print. Archive started back in 1996, and currently has somewhere around 28 million books and texts within their system.
They now scan 3500 new books into their system every single day, and you’re virtually guaranteed to find what it is you’re looking for here. I enjoy using it for out-of-print farm books from the 1800s. Nobody else out there even comes close to having that kind of content.
Baen Books
If you’re specifically looking to delve hard into the sci-fi and fantasy scene, Baen Books is worth your while. Like most other sites for free ebooks, Baen does offer ebooks to buy, but they also have a free ebook library you can peruse with a couple hundred options to choose from.
They’ve been around for quite some time, and a lot of the sci-fi lit community spends some serious time there (e.g. Michael Z. Williamson), so if that’s what you’re after, this can be a great place to start your search.
BookBub
This site is pretty cool. If you grow tired of wasting time looking for something to read rather than actually reading, BookBub can help. They have a pretty good algorithm which can help you to determine what books are out there you may be willing to spend time on.
Once you find an author you like, you’ll receive email notifications of whenever they have new product out, and you’ll also receive ebooks in your inbox. All in all, it’s a pretty cool site you’ll enjoy.
Book Cave
A little bit of everything is here.
Emphasis on the ‘little bit’. It’s really not a lot, and mostly indie pub as well. Consider the free science fiction section at Book Cave. At the moment, there’s 13 products available there for your reading pleasure. Compare that to Archive.org, or just about anywhere else and there’s no comparison whatsoever. You’re not going to find any classics here either, just indie pub.
So this may be a good place to explore new authors you’re looking to support, but there are most certainly more comprehensive options out there.
Kindle
You can get free ebooks even via your Amazon account with Kindle. Well, via a subscription service, anyway. You have to first subscribe to Kindle Unlimited (currently $9.99/month), and then you can read as much as you want.
There’s a pretty large collection of everything in here as well. If it’s on Amazon, there’s a high probability it’s on here. I have noticed that there is a massive amount of indie pub on here as well.
That’s not a bad thing, but it may not be what you’re looking for. That being said, the indie pub here that is free often has thousands of positive reviews, so you know you’re not going to be wasting your time.
Open Culture
You can find about 800 free eBooks here, and they’re all from really old authors. This is where you may want to turn if you’re searching for books written by the likes of Homer, Aristotle, or Sir Francis Bacon. They do have some Ray Bradbury and other more recent authors as well, but the eBooks you’re going to find here are largely considered the “classics” of modern day thought.
If you’re looking for something educational for a home school program and don’t want to have to sift through thousands of pages of indie pub, this is where you’re going to want to turn.
Project Gutenberg
Started back in 1971, Project Gutenberg is a massive repository of older texts. Anything which is considered a classic, and the rest of the older books which are not, are going to be present here. Seldom will you ever find anything which is newer, however.
This is where I would look for authors such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Alexis de Tocqueville, or Chaucer, just to give you an idea of what you’re going to find.
Smashwords
This is the bread and butter of a lot of new authors who are trying to get their name out there. While there are paid options as well, Smashwords does have free eBooks. If we hold our sci-fi test up to Smashbooks, we find that there are quite a few here that we can pick up for free along with several others where we choose the price.
Out of all the free eBooks sites, particularly for indie pub, Smashwords is one of the ones that I appreciate the most. It’s not that the other sites are bad, it’s just that they don’t have the name for themselves that Smashwords does.
Ipso Finis (but not of free eBooks)
One of the great things about the internet is that it literally puts the world’s information right at your fingertips. Any hobby you may have, the internet has information on. Regardless of whether you enjoy spending time carving, gardening, knitting, making soup, watching sci-fi movies, or blacksmithing – if you’re looking for eBooks on the subject, you can find them.
Fiction, history, how-to’s – you name it – you can find it in eBook form online. Hopefully, the above list of sites will help your bibliophilic tendencies to not cause you to have to get a second mortgage on your home, proving of some benefit.
What are your thoughts though? Are there other sites you enjoy that we missed? How have your experiences been with the above? Let us know in the comments below!
About Aden
Aden Tate is a regular contributor to TheOrganicPrepper.com. Along with being a freelance writer, he also works part-time on his micro-farm where he raises dairy goats, a pig, honeybees, meat chickens, laying chickens, tomatoes, mushrooms, and greens. Aden has two published books, The Faithful Prepper and Zombie Choices. You can find his podcast The Last American on Preppers’ Broadcasting Network.
5 thoughts on “9 Places to Find Free eBooks”
The best is b(dash)ok(dot)cc
My experience with Kindle has been mixed. Over the years I had purchased access to about 50 such titles and because I didn’t like the restrictions on the physical Kindle reader, I had always downloaded the “free” reader software from Amazon to be installed on my Win 7 PC. Then Amazon “upgraded” that software and trashed my ability to read Kindle ebooks on my PC. At least their tech support advised me that until they could get their software fixed, I could use this workaround: I was to log into read.amazon.com and use my own username and password, etc. Once logged in, I could read any of those titles I had purchased access while online. I never looked back, since even after a year their software for my Win 7 system still hadn’t been fixed.
Archive.org has its own history. While it does have an enormous collection of book titles, it has been caught in recent times having deleted some materials for seemingly “politically incorrect” reasons. How bad that may get is not possible to predict. On other materials (such as their copies of back issues of The Organic Prepper dot com), they consistently take snapshots of the articles — but not any of the comments … even if sometimes the comments in total are several times as large as the articles themselves.
Since the history of book and manuscript destruction goes back thousands of years, it’s not surprising that Archive.org is merely a bit late to that game.
Google has its own collection of book copies. It regards anything older than an expired copyright date as fair game to archive (which I think is about 75 years). That would turn such copies into “free ebooks.” I have sometimes found much older titles archived there … for free immediate download. Just go to
https://books.google.com/?hl=en
to search for titles of possible interest to you to see if there’s a copy there.
–Lewis
If you have a Prime account, you get a free ebook each month. Choice is limited to their editors picks but there are usually 6- 8 choices as well as a childrens book.
Local libraries offer free ebooks often thru multiple services (I think mine has at least 3 or 4 different services they offer). These services work just like your library card, you check a book out and return it when you are done.
try – https://www.pdfdrive.com/ it’s amazing…
You might also want to consider z-library. https://z-lib.org/ Millions of free books, in various formats. Some of the files are not in excellent shape, but there are usually several renditions to try. So far, I am batting about 98% in great condition.