Obsession: Free e-books

So I haven't posted on here for a while, just figured I'd give a rundown of some of the free e-books you can find these days.

First, how to read them. Of course you can download free e-books as PDF files on your computer and read them leased to the screen. You've been able to do that forever. But these days, why would you? Surely you have some sort of mobile platform - an iTouch or iPhone or generic clone thereof, a Kindle or Nook or some other e-book reader.


I don't own a Kindle. I find their prices, proprietary formats and DRM irritating. I love Amazon.com for their services to the old-school book, but truly dislike their e-book style. So instead, I've gone with an iTouch. Now, there is a free Kindle app on the iTouch, in case you decide you just have to have your Amazon.com. Barnes & Noble also has a free app on the iTouch comparable to the Kindle app; check book prices and see which store suits you better, I suppose. Or get both and use whichever is having a sale at the moment.

Now those are all well and good; but if you'd like to get away from the pay sites and explore the world of "free", follow me this way. The best iTouch book application out there at the moment is the e-book reader "Stanza", from Lexcycle. It's free, and you can use it a couple ways. The first way is to download books wirelessly directly to the device from the Stanza-provided links. These links come in two categories: free and paid. In the paid links, of course, you can go with a bunch of sites; Books On Board, Feedbooks, SmashWords, etc. Some of these also offer free books, but there's an entire section of links in Stanza which only provide free books.

Best of all, you're not limited to the links provided by Stanza on the application; you can find any PDF file you like, download it, and then upload it to your wireless device from your computer.

Let's discuss a few sources: Random House Free e-reads, the Baen free e-book library and Gutenberg.

Random House has provided a dozen free books, all modern, all very high quality. They include Charlie Huston and a couple other big names. They get huge props for their selection and their decision to give away these books. As a bonus, you can download these straight from the Stanza application.

Baen was doing e-books long before the other publishers, and they have a lovely set of free books available on their website. Here's a link to the instructions for accessing Baen from Stanza: http://www.webscription.net//t-iphone.aspx

And then there's project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg is awesome. They have the largest, most interesting, most diverse free library anywhere online. Most of the other sites which advertise "free e-books" are just copying parts of the Gutenberg library, and they don't even have the more interesting stuff.

So what's good on Gutenberg? Well, if you ignore the basic classics like Jayne Eyre and Wuthering Heights, the complete works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, roman classics like Tacitus, childrens' lit like Alice in Wonderland, the complete works of Edgar Allen Poe - if you ignore all these there's still a couple hundred thousand books to pick from. And some of them are excellent.

The best way to find books on Gutenberg might be the bookshelf option. Here you go: http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Category:Bookshelf

The bookshelf at Gutenberg sorts your books into categories. Fantasy, Humor, Crime Fiction, Love - all there. Just browse away. I personally like the Science Fiction shelf, it's got some classics.

Of course, there are places besides those I've mentioned to get e-books. I've found free books hidden away on websites devoted to TV shows, on personal web pages, in links on Twitter - there's tons of reading material out there. Then there are the paid sites - There's Lulu.com, the self-publishing site, where you can buy original works and download them in PDF format; sort of a hit and miss as to quality, but some original ideas do exist on there.

All in all, there's a whole world of awesome out there in ebook land, and a lot of it is free.


Note: a corporate lawyer has some bad news about Stanza: http://www.teleread.org/2009/04/27/amazonlexcycle-acquisition-is-bad-for-ebook-classics/