24
votes
What are some of the best free ebooks available online?
Project Gutenberg is a great resource for free books, but its 50,000+ titles are intimidating in number (if not outright impenetrable). The same goes for other free ebook aggregators/feeds, of which there are many. There are also lots of authors who offer up their books for free. And, of course, there are tons of free options available in, say, the Kindle store. While it's nice to have so many choices, it hinders discoverability. Individual books get lost in all the noise.
As such, I'd like to know: what are some standout, recommended books that are available to readers for free?
Obvious disclaimer: I am not interested in pirated content.
Such a wonderfully small selection of classics.
I thoroughly recommend reading Frankenstein & Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. No movie adaption has really been able to do them justice.
The Importance of Being Earnest & Right Ho, Jeeves are comedic gold, even today.
The Scarlet Pimpenel & The Strange Case of Dr Jeckyl & Mr Hyde are also amazing.
Nice. The resource I didn't even realize that I was looking for. Fixes every Gutenberg gripe I've had, plus a few I didn't even think of.
These are the Penguin Classics of libre books! Beautiful!
If you're into science fiction, the publisher Baen always has a selection of free novels and annual short story collections in the Baen Free Library.
On Basilisk Station the first book of David Weber's "Honor Harrington" space opera series is in there, as are some works by Eric Flint, John Ringo, and plenty of others.
Mother of Learning by Domagoj Kurmaic is a fantastic read so far, and is nearing completion. Fantasy/adventure/mystery with a groundhog day-esque scenario.
While not in ebook form, someone wrote a script to grab the chapters and pack it into an epub+mobi (with approval from the author): https://github.com/frrad/mol-ebook
Fictionpress is one of the many websites supported by FanFicFare, so a specific script is not needed. For other websites - and FFF supports a lot of them - kemayo/leech seems promising, but needs a little fiddling. It worked out of the box for Wandering Inn, at least.
Just for the record, here is a pretty harsh review of HPMoR, which I stumbled across some time ago. I like HPMoR - it might have helped in keeping me alive - but the review has been... interesting.
Wait, what?
Holy mother of god, the author weren't joking! That page is 281kB heavy. It's an insane amount of words, considering there's minimal CSS/JS bloat.
Don't forget Eloquent JavaScript and You Don't Know JavaScript.
Check and see if your library is a member of Overdrive/Libby. If it is, download Libby immediately. There are so many e-books and audiobooks on there to borrow. It's changed my life, no hyperbole. The only downside is that it's a popular app so you may have to wait a while if you want to read a popular book. That's OK though, because Libby will automatically check your book out for you once it is ready. And, in the meantime, you can filter by available books and read something else while you wait.
Same here. I wish I found out about Libby sooner. Checking out eBooks is extremely easy, and there client is pretty good as well. My reading tremendously increased after I got it. All you need is a library card.
Projecto Adamastor is a repository of public-domain work in Portuguese, not unlike Standard Ebooks or Project Gutenberg. My Portuguese is not good enough yet to just dive in and read, so I can't make specific suggestions, but worth checking out if you can read Portuguese.
As far as Audiobooks go, a lot of public domain stuff is available on https://librivox.org/ . It's all volunteer based, so quality is variable, but it's all free to look for.
Also of interest is the old Podiobooks collection on Scribl, and the books should be available as podcasts on a podcatcher of your choice. I liked the Quarter Share series, Shadowmagic, and Playing for Keeps, (it's been a while, so I've probably got some nostalgia fog and they may all be duds upon further review.) Scribl is hard to navigate, but the original podcasts were all right.
There's a lot of good fanfic, even if finding it requires some digging, and plenty of web serials.
They are not quite books, but something like Worm, Mother of Learning, or The Wandering Inn, will keep you occupied for a while. I am liking the latter very much - LitRPG, people from Earth end up in a fantasy world, one is an innkeeper with a skeleton barmaid - but it's long.
Speaking of web serials, I recommend Worth the Candle by cthulhuraejepsen (aka Alexander Wales).
Check out Unsong. Basically its Talmudic magic meets modern capitalism.
The ebook can be found here
And it even has a subreddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/unsong