Get Thousands of Free Books for Your Computer, Your Kindle, or Your Nook

As the prices of such ebook readers as the Nook and Knidle drop, many people are hesitant to buy them because of the prices of books to read on them. But, there are so many sources for free ebooks online that although I have about 8,000 ebooks that I can access on my recently purchased Kindle, I have not bought any of them.

Free software to access free books

The classic reader for digital books is the Adobe Reader, to access Adobe .pdf files (with their distinctive red and white icon). The reader generally comes installed on most computers, but I learned in one day that two of my friends did not have it. So, if you need this software, you can download it for free here .

You can turn your computer or smart phone into a virtual Nook (more information) or Kindle (more information) with free software that you can download from Barnes & Noble (Nook) or Amazon (Kindle). The Nook software accesses the .epub format, while the Kindle accesses the .mobi format.

The free software Calibre which lets you do so many things with ebooks allows you to read almost any format of ebook and also lets you convert from one format to another. As I've already written (here), Calibre gives you free subscriptions to hundreds of newspapers and magazines from around the world. Check my article for the download link.

Free books from the Internet Archive - Visit the site here.

With its slogan, "Universal Access to Knowledge," the Internet Archive is a great online warehouse for texts, audio, and video. It is not all high brow; there are some wonderful old horror movies and a huge colelction of old time radio programs. Are you disappointed by the new Green Hornet film? Listen to (and even download) sixty-seven episodes of the original radio program here.

You can even publish your own books and other materials in the Internet Archive. In a recent article (here) , I wrote about a valuable book on dealing with childhood sexual abuse which its author Theresa Wiza (more) posted there.

They claim to have 2,629,988 texts available for free download, starting from the text page (here) in a variety of formats, Nook's .epub, Kindle's .mobi, Acrobat's .pdf, and more. So, if you download five texts a day, you will not run out of reading material for over 1,400 years. If you should move during that time, you will not have to worry about packing your books from the Internet Archive.

Free books from Project Gutenberg - Visit the site here.

Project Gutenberg was the first of the Internet's free libraries, for many years providing only plain text (.txt) files, which open in Windows Notepad. Now, "you can download over 33,000 free ebooks to read on your PC, iPad, Kindle, Sony Reader, iPhone, Android or other portable device." Yes, 33,000! They still provide the plain .txt files and .html files (which will open in your Internet browser), but they do not provide Adobe .pdf files. Their ebooks are free in the United States because their copyright has expired.

There is a Project Gutenberg in Australia (here). Their books are provided in .txt, .html, and .zip (compressed) formats. Australia's copyright law is different from the copyright law in the United States, so they can offer texts which the original Project Gutenberg cannot, most notably Gone with the Wind. Unfortunately, if you access these files from the United States, you will be breaking the law, so, of course, none of my readers in the United States will be seeing these ebooks, will you?

Free books from Munsey's - Visit the site here.

Munsey's is the only one of these three sites that is a ".com," a commercial site. It was known as Black Mask before the site was sued and even taken offline for a while for alleged copyright violation. It appears that they have some rather offbeat books that may not be on the other sites.

More free books

There are many specialized sources of free books online, for instance Buddhanet (here), which offers a variety of Buddhist texts, and Christian Classics Ethereal Library (here) , which offers Christian texts.

Most surprisingly, online bookstores offer free books, but that is for another article. I do not think you will run out of free books to read on your computer, your Nook, or your Kindle until then.

Check this index to my articles on "How to Read Ebooks for Pleasure and Convenience."