E-Books and Libraries - What's Available for Free

Excerpted from Public Libraries, online publication of the Public Library Association

July/August 2011, vol. 50, no. 4

Written by Sheila Konen, Manager of Adult Services, Rochester Hills Public Library; Mary VanderLinde, Adult Services Librarian, Rochester Hills Public Library; Nancy Mires, Adult Services Librarian, Rochester Hills Public Library; and Christine Lind Hage, Director of Rochester Hills Public Library

Many websites currently offer free e-books.  These resources range from the original site for free text online, Project Gutenberg, to search engines that search e-book sources.   The variety and quality varies as outlined below.

Baen Books - http://www.baen.com/library/ - This science fiction and fantasy publisher is making some of its titles available digitally and includes some well-known authors.  About 120 titles are currently available but new titles are being added regularly.  These books can be saved to a PC or sent directly to a Kindle.

Book Lending – http://www.booklending.com/ - Book Lending is a website that matches lenders and borrowers of Kindle e-books.  To participate in lending and borrowing Kindle books, you must first register as a user on the site or connect with Facebook Connect. You may lend/borrow a book once between Kindles. Eligible titles are very limited and mainstream authors are blocked for the most part. The service has been marketed to Kindle owners and is similar to e-book Fling (http://ebookfling.com/) which allows lending of Kindle and Nook titles between owners.  This service is not currently available to libraries.

Digital Book Index - http://www.digitalbookindex.com/about.htm - Digital Book Index provides links to more than 165,000 full-text digital books from more than 1,800 commercial and non-commercial publishers, universities, and various private sites, including Gutenberg, NetLibrary, Google, and many, many universities worldwide.  More than 140,000 of these books, texts, and documents are available free although there are some titles that do have a download fee.  A device with Internet access is necessary for use and Digital Book Index supports iPad, Kindle, & Nook readers.  Loan periods vary depending upon the e-book source, but most are for online use.  Searching can be done by author, title, author & title, title keyword, and browsing by subject, author, or publisher.  Titles and subjects vary widely from science, history and law to literature, the arts, and children’s books with some going back to the 1600s.

E-Discover the Classics - http://www.clicweb.org/e-discover-home - Colorado Library Consortium and Douglas County Libraries put this site together which consists of 500 classics by authors such as Twain, Austen, and O. Henry.   This library-friendly service provides 466 ‘cleaned’ MARC records which can be downloaded to library catalogs that link to the Project Gutenberg site.  Library patrons would locate classic titles in the local library catalog (Jane Eyre, Emily Dickinson, A Christmas Carol, etc.) and the catalog records include a hot link to the Project Gutenberg site. Each Gutenberg title can be downloaded in one of eight formats for different e-readers.

Free e-books - http://www.free-ebooks.net/ - Free standard memberships give members unlimited access to e-books in the HTML format and access to 5 e-books every month in the PDF and/or TXT formats. Free-e-books.net is maintained by a group of bibliophiles whose mission is to promote literacy and share their author's messages with the world. Titles include fiction, nonfiction, business, lifestyle; all unknown authors.

Google Books - http://books.google.com/ebooks - Google offers nearly 3 million free e-books from the public domain.  Some of the most popular free classics can be browsed in the store using the "Free Classics" shelf.  In addition, they have partnered with publishers and authors to make hundreds of thousands of e-books available for purchase. These include new releases and bestsellers with new titles added to Google e-books every day. Google Books stores a person’s library in the digital cloud, so books can be read on just about any device with an Internet connection. Google Books is compatible with Android phones, iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, web browsers and many supported e-readers.

Hathi Trust Digital Library – http://www.hathitrust.org/ - The Hathi Trust includes titles for online use so an Internet connection is necessary. Download is available only for affiliate users at a cost and currently all member institutions are universities.  The Hathi Trust Working Group recent announced some new features including:

•Views allowing scrolling through volumes, flipping pages similar to a physical book, and viewing thumbnail images of all pages in a volume

•Reorganized and streamlined interface including prominent display of copyright status, and re-positioning of navigation features

•Quick-copy links for individual pages in addition to permanent links for volumes and

•Improved user experience, including progress bar, for full-PDF downloads

The titles themselves are older (pre-1950) academic non-fiction titles although it does include some ancient drama and some Whitman poems.  Some more recent bulletins, papers, and classics are also available.  Full-text content could be useful for term papers.

Inkmesh - http://inkmesh.com/ - This search engine makes it easier to find free e-books and compare e-book prices for the Kindle, iPhone, Sony Reader, Nook and more.  Searching only free e-books is possible; limiting to just Sony, Kobo, Kindle, Smashwords, Nook, and Baen books is also an option.  Each record indicates the devices that are compatible.  Searching by subject allows for narrowing by price and device as well.  There are over 3,500 promotional e-books that appear to be lesser known authors of fiction and nonfiction titles, including self-help, religion, business, science/nature, romance, science fiction/fantasy, literature, and erotica. Browsing subjects is also an option.

Munseys - http://www.munseys.com/ - Offering 20,000 titles in 12 formats, Munseys explicitly identifies proper choice for Kindles, Nooks and Sony Readers. Titles can be found by searching author, title or tags and browsing is available in 39 different categories. The e-book collection has many titles found in the other collections listed, however, some categories offer distinctive titles.  Tip: When downloading a title, first click “Select One” to choose the desired format, then click “download.”   

The Online Books Page - http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/ - This is a website that facilitates access to books that are freely readable over the Internet. It also aims to encourage the development of such online books, for the benefit and edification of all.  This site provides indexing/searching to then link to source sites for free, online digital content. It indexes over 1 million titles including academic, classics, self-published, serials, and a variety of free titles that are full text.    Searches can be done by author, title, subject and LC call number.    Titles must be read online so an internet connection is necessary. There are a variety of formats and restrictions noted where individual sources cite them.

Open Library - http://openlibrary.org/ - Open Library is an online site of over 1 million books and is part of the Internet Archive.    Not all of the titles are available in digital format – some records link to WorldCat where library holdings of physical copies can be viewed.  Also available are e-books for users with an OpenLIbrary.org account enabling the borrowing of the lendable e-books using laptops, reading devices or library computers.  The Internet Archive and participating libraries have selected digitized books from their collections that are available to be borrowed by one patron at a time for free. These books can be read in an internet browser, and PDF and EPUB formats managed by Adobe Digital Editions (and DAISY for the print disabled). You can choose which format you prefer as you complete the borrowing process.  Account holders can borrow up to 5 e-books at a time for up to 2 weeks.   Books may only be borrowed by one person at a time.  The site provides access to all of Project Gutenberg's books plus hundreds of thousands of others as well.  The selection ranges from Little Golden Books, off the beaten track science fiction, textbooks, and classics from Rudyard Kipling and Shakespeare.

One hundred fifty libraries have donated scans of 85,000 books which are available for download to patrons of those libraries who donated books.

Free/low-cost eBook sources

Compiled by High Point Public Library

www.adobe.com/products/digitaleditions/library

Enjoy free sample eBooks including entire books and preview chapters from leading publishers.

www.bookyards.com

Our goal/dream is to be "The Library to the World", in which books, education materials, information, reference materials, documents, and content will be provided freely to anyone who has an internet connection.

http://www.dailylit.com/

Great stories and knowledge in under 5 minutes a day. Read books online: get short installments by daily email (or RSS feed).

www.digilibraries.com

The aim of the site is to give quality, fast and required services for downloading and reading eBooks. The site was created by readers for readers that why we are ready to listen to your propositions or critics of our site to become better for you.

www.freebookspot.com

Free Book Spot is a free e-books links library where you can find and download free books in almost any category and in a variety of formats.  Free registration required.

www.feedbooks.com

Feedbooks offers thousands of public domain books and original books from new authors that you can read on any mobile device; Choose Public Domain

www.fictionwise.com

Fictionwise.com is committed to providing the Internet's most comprehensive collection of fiction and nonfiction in the most popular eBook formats.

www.friedbeef.com/best-places-to-get-free-books-the-ultimate-guide

Index of sites offering free eBooks

www.getfreeebooks.com

Index of sites offering free books and resources for aspiring authors of books published electronically.

www.globusz.com

Our goal is to create and operate the premier source for free, contemporary, e-books on the web. Also a resource for authors of eBooks.

www.hongkiat.com/blog/20-best-websites-to-download-free-e-books

A tremendous index of websites offering free eBooks on a variety of topics, as well as technical resources for eBooks authors.

http://www.archive.org/details/texts

A wide range of fiction, popular books, children's books, historical texts and academic books.

www.literature.org

On this site you will find the full and unabridged texts of classic works of English literature.

www.manybooks.net

ManyBooks - Thousands of free ebooks,

pre-formatted for reading on many different devices

www.qbend.com

Driven digitally: the ultimate digital reading experience

http://www.readeasily.com/

An eBooks online library with built-in accessibility functions for readers with sight-related needs.

www.scribd.com

Social reading site that can link with your Facebook account

www.ulib.org

Carnegie Mellon university’s Universal Digital Library

http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Free_eBooks