Which formats should you use?

• Refer to the Formats page for guidance.

Search Engines and Lists

• ebooksearchr – probably the best starting place
• “Best Places to Get Free Books – The Ultimate Guide” – includes lots of links to real-world book swapping sites as well
• www.digitalbookindex.­org – Searches for free and $ versions of ebooks.

General Collections

• Feedbooks – My favorite free ebook source for the Kindle.
• Project Gutenberg – The classic, and possibly biggest, source of public domain titles, in multiple formats.
• Wowio – Read titles and comics online for free, download PDF copies for a fee. Some ad-supported PDF downloads as well. This company has had some funding issues in the past but seems to be back up as of January 2010.
• Internet Archive – It can be a bit of a chore to slog through the unfriendly interface, but you can find lots of public domain material here in multiple formats.
• www.librarything.com/ – PDF files of public domain works.

Sci-Fi and Fantasy

• Baen Free Library
• Tor Books – sci-fi “supersite” offers free downloads of stories

Miscellaneous

• www.textfiles.com/ – Archive of content posted to Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) in the mid-1980s. Includes some fiction, but the real value is buried in all the other, user-generated categories.

Tech and Computer Books

• http://www.freetechbooks.com/
• http://www.pdfchm.com/
• http://www.realtimepublishers.com/
• http://itdiscover.com/links/
• http://www.phatsayar.blogspot.com/

Magazines, Trade Pubs, Business

• http://www.tradepub.com/
• http://e-books-for-everyone.blogspot.com/
• http://www.asiaing.com/
• http://www.ebooksbay.org/

Audiobooks

• http://www.audiobooksforfree.com/
• http://podiobooks.com/
• http://welltoldtales.com/ (sci-fi, horror, and hardboiled/pulp stories)

Communities

These aren’t places to find free books, but rather communities you can join to talk to other readers and find recommendations.

• Goodreads
• Bookyards

Bad Sites!

Sometimes you’ll find sketchy looking “free” (meaning pirated, usually) ebook sites out there. Sometimes those sites will try to do bad things to your computer. The sites below all triggered various malware or virus warnings when I visited them–stay away!

• ebookshare.net

(Photos: “Free” by koka_sexton; “Venus Flytrap” by Aidan Wojtas)