Free eBooks and Audio Books

If you're a gadget fan and enjoy being able to read a book on your iPhone, Palm Pilot, etc, then you owe it to yourself to check out http://manybooks.net/ There are thousands of free eBooks available for a lot of format choices, including Kindle, eReader, PDF, Mobipocket, Plucker, iSolo, and about twenty more. They're all public domain so they're free, but you'll find tons of books that you want to read if you look around. The "special collections" link has a list of "books to read before you die" if you need some ideas. I found several classics that I had thought about buying, and have expanded to a full library through the afternoon. I only stopped so I could actually read one of them.

You can get a program to view eBooks on your computer at http://www.ereader.com/ereader/software/browse.htm

If you use the eReader software for the iPhone, you need to click the "+" sign on your bookshelf screen, and choose "manybooks.net." It will download the book directly to your iPhone bookshelf. I don't know a way to transfer them from the PC, but they only take about three seconds to download on the phone, so I don't think it could get any easier.



Reading not your thing? Still want to enjoy a book? How about an audio book? "Too expensive," you say? Well, what if a bunch of people volunteer to read to you? That's what you get on http://librivox.org/ The file format seems to be MP3 and Ogg Vorbis for the ones I checked out. Be prepared for big downloads, though. You can get each part seperately, or look for the "entire book in zip format" link to get it all at once. If you're really bored or feeling altruistic, you can record yourself reading a part of a book and upload it for others to download. It's limited to public domain, though. Check the instructions on the website before you spend your day in your recording studio. (The manybooks.net site actually has a collection of books in a category called "Audible" that all have links to librivox.org so you can get the eBook and the Audio version.)


Of course, if you don't already know, most libraries allow you to check out eBooks and audio books from their web pages that expire after a certain amount of time. It is definitely worth it to get the latest book without paying a ton, as long as you don't feel the need to fill your own library.

I also haven't scratched the surface of Project Gutenburg (http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page) or the Google Book Search (http://books.google.com/). There are a ton of ways to get books for free, even if you don't want to leave your house to go to the library. It might motivate you to go check that building out again actually, when you start realizing how much money you're saving! Especially after shelling out the money for that iPhone!