It’s no secret that eReaders sales are booming. The Apple iPad was an overnight success providing a number of different reading applications for your electronic um curso em milagres. At the same time dedicated eReaders suppliers, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Sony, cut their prices while providing new innovations to their reading devices. We as consumers are happy to have these latest gadgets and innovations; however what matters most to us, is not the devices, but the reading content. Additionally, as consumers, we are never satisfied, not only do we want a wide variety of electronic books, sometimes we want them to be free. As the old expression goes, “there is no such thing as a free lunch”. Read on to see, that this is not the case for electronic books.
Before we start to look at where to find free electronic books, we need to take a look at a few different considerations; which ebooks are free, and the different electronic book formats.
To be realistic, when you are looking for free electronic books, you are not going to find the latest best sellers, such as, The Girl with the Tattoo Dragon or Harry Potter. To legally download an electronic book it must be identified as being in the public domain or be specifically identified as non-commercial. This means that a majority of the ebooks that you will find are often classics, like “Pride and Prejudice” or up-and-coming authors who are looking for exposure by distributing free ebooks.
There are dozen of electronic book formats, but the most popular include the ePub format and the Amazon formats. The Apple iPad, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, the Sony Readers, and the Kobo Reader can all read the ePub eBook format. However, the Amazon eReaders cannot. The Kindle 3 and the Kindle DX use their own propriety format (.azw) and can also read the mobipocket format. All of these eReaders can also read pdf documents. However, for anyone who has tried to read pdf files on one of the smaller eReaders, it rapidly proves to be a frustrating experience. Keep the reading of pdf documents to the larger eReaders, such as the Kindle DX & iPad.
Let’s get started by looking at the resources that you can use to find free electronic books.
A good site to get started is FeedBooks. They provide a clear and easy to navigate site with ePub, Kindle, and pdf formats, with the possibility to choose categorized in English, French, German, Russian, and Spanish. All of the ebooks on this site have a non-commercial license so there is no time wasted coming across payable ebooks. FeedBooks also offers the ability to inspiring authors to publish their own eBooks.
ManyBooks also offers an exclusively non-commercial electronic book site. Similar to FeedBooks it offers a site that is easy to navigate and ad-free. The main strengths of ManyBooks is its advanced search and its eBook recommendation for those of you who don’t want to spend time searching.
Munseys is a website that has over 20 thousand rare and hard to find titles to choose from. You can browse eBooks by category or search the new or popular sections. Book reviews and comments are also posted on the website.
Zinepal allows anyone to create an eBook from their online content. As a reader you can search through the content and download the electronic books in popular formats.
BookYards is another good electronic book resource. Their goal is to be the library to the world. They currently have almost 20 thousand books in their collection. Their content includes ebooks, educational material, reference material, and other useful documents. A majority of the electronic books are available for download in PDF format.