Free books in nearly any subject you can think of abound on the Web, ready to be read, downloaded, and shared. Here are the top twenty sites where you can find free books, anything from romance novels to computer technology manuals.
Do you have a favorite free book site? Feel free to submit your own favorite free book sites, and share them with the About.com community.
- ReadPrint.com: "Our website offers thousands of free books for students, teachers, and the classic enthusiast." Lots of great titles here, including Jane Eyre, 1984, and Hamlet.
- ManyBooks.net: free books for your PDA or iPod. Includes reviews.
- The Literature Network: Search by author here; many classic authors are represented.
- Free Computer Books, Tutorials & Lecture Notes: Every computer subject and programming language you can think of is represented here.
- Librivox.org: "LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain, and then we release the audio files back onto the net (podcast and catalog). Our objective is to make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet."
- LearnOutLoud.com: "your one-stop destination for audio and video learning." Over 10,000 selections at the time of this writing.
- Authorama.com: "completely free books from a variety of different authors, collected here for you to read online or offline."
- Project Gutenberg: Over 30,000 free downloadable ebooks for your PC, iPhone, Kindle, Sony Reader or other portable device.
- Scribd offers a fascination collection of all kinds of reading materials: presentations, textbooks, popular reading, and much more, all organized by topic.
- International Digital Children's Library: Browse through a wide selection of high quality children's literature here.
- eBookPDF: Over 100,000 ebooks on technology-related subjects ranging from programming to data mining.
- Gallica: Excellent source for primary documents and research materials.
- Ebooks and Text Archives: From the Internet Archive; a library of fiction, popular books, children's books, historical texts and academic books.
- World Public Library: Over 750,000 books for you to read here, on virtually any subject.
- Questia Public Library: Over 5000 books available here, mostly classics and research-related.
- Wikisource: Online library of user-submitted and maintained content.
- Wikibooks: Free online library of educational textbooks.
- Bibliomania: More than 2000 pieces of free online literature, mostly classics.
- ManyBooks; Lots of great free ebooks here for you to download onto your favorite portable reading device or PC.
- Digital Classics: More than 100 classics to pursue in a fantastic digital format (very realistic); also offers textbooks and magazines.
