17 Best Sites to Download Free Books in 2020
Ever thought of creating a library with thousands of free books? You'd never have to spend a dime. It sounds impossible, but it's not. Free books on nearly any subject you can think of are all over the internet, ready to be downloaded, read, and shared. These are the 17 best sites with free books covering a wide variety of subjects, anything from romance novels to computer technology manuals.
A huge quantity of books previously unavailable to the public was released starting in 2019 thanks to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998. Because of an amendment to that act, works published between 1923 and 1977 can enter the public domain 95 years after their creation. Many of the sites listed below give access to the tens of thousands of books (plus movies, songs, and cartoons) available under this act. Downloads should be free and without retribution under U.S. copyright law.
ManyBooks
Selection includes more than just classics and Creative Commons books.
Great categorization makes finding what you love easier.
Variety of download formats.
Some areas haven't been updated in more than a year.
Some books do cost money.
ManyBooks is one of the best resources on the web for free books in a variety of download formats. There are hundreds of titles here in all sorts of interesting genres and they're completely free. Not all of the books are classics, so if you're into other genres, this site is a good alternative to others in this list.
Unlike some sites, this one lets you browse free books by language. You can also search by author and genre. The ManyBooks Articles page is another handy way to browse their collection, with articles such as "Books Like Hatchet" and book reviews.
Downloading books requires a free account login. Then, you're then given several download options, such as EPUB, MOBI, PDF, FB2, RTF, HTML, and more. They're also readable online through the site's built-in book reader.
One easy way to stay updated with new ManyBooks titles is through their RSS feed.
Free Computer Books
Extensive collection of computer books.
Includes lecture notes.
Dated site design.
Everything on the site is just hyperlinks to other sites.
Lacks various ebook formats.
Every computer subject and programming language you can think of is represented at Free Computer Books. There are free textbooks, extensive lecture notes, and more.
Some of the genres include computer and programming languages, computer science, data science, computer engineering, Java, and networking and communications. There are also many subgenres, giving you an easy way to find the book you're after.
Librivox
Free audiobooks (which can be quite pricey!).
Audiobooks are available in multiple languages.
Large collection of children's audiobooks.
Books are ready by volunteers, which means performances can be hit or miss.
Many listed authors have zero books available.
If you've been looking for a great place to find free audio books, Librivox is a good place to start. The site has many volunteers that work to release quality recordings of classic books. All the titles here are absolutely free, which is good news for those of us who've had to pony up ridiculously high fees for substandard audiobooks.
Authorama
Easily readable format.
You can read right in the browser.
No account necessary.
Bare bones website.
Lacks books in foreign languages (except some German).
Lacks advanced search features.
Authorama offers a good selection of free books from a variety of authors, both current and classic. They're organized alphabetically by the author’s last name and are written in HTML and XHTML, which means they're in an easily readable format. Most books here are featured in English, but there are quite a few German language texts as well.
Authorama offers up a good selection of high-quality, free books you can read right in your browser. These are books in the public domain, which means they're freely accessible and allowed to be distributed. In other words, you don't need to worry if you're looking at something illegal here.
This free book site is really simple to use, but maybe too simple. The search box is really basic and the only other way to find books is by scrolling through the author list. But, you don't need a user account to read these books online, and they're all formatted nicely.
Project Gutenberg
Over 60,000 titles available.
Wide variety of formats.
Top 100 list aids discoverability.
Majority of books are in English only.
Books may not be free outside of the U.S.
Project Gutenbergis one of the largest and oldest sources for free books on the web, with over 60,000 downloadable titles available in a wide variety of formats. The vast majority of books are released in English, but there are other languages available.
If you already know what you're looking for, search the database by author name, title, language, or subjects. You can also check out the top 100 list to see what other people are downloading.
International Children's Digital Library
Large collection of international children's books.
Search by country, recently added, and more.
The books are actually just images of scanned pages.
Links appear to be broken.
Browse through a wide selection of high-quality free books for children at International Children's Digital Library (ICDL). These are scans of physical books, so each page is a separate image you can scroll through and read.
Check out Simple Search to get a big picture of how this library is organized: by age, book cover color, length of book, genre, and more.
Read Print
Easy to search.
Free account grants access to the community and a personal page with a virtual "bookshelf."
Comprehensive quotation database.
Offers lots of ways to find free books.
Only has classic books and those with Creative Commons licenses.
No way to download free books directly from the site.
The site can be slow and/or unresponsive.
Read Print is an online library of thousands of free books. These classics are available under the Creative Commons license and include nonfiction, essays, fiction, plays, and poetry.
Free registration isn't required but it lets you track what you've read and what you want to read. It also lets you write reviews of books you've read, add books to your favorites, and join online book clubs or discussion lists.
There are several ways you can find what you're looking for at Read Print, such as by keyword search for a title or author, type of work (e.g., essays, plays, non-fiction), list of top books that are being read online, and the author index. For example, if you're looking for books by William Shakespeare, a simple search turns up all his works.
Once you find a book you're interested in, use the Read Online button to launch it in your browser. You also have the option to Launch Reading Mode if you're not fond of the website's other reading interface.
If you find a book you really like and you'd like to download it to your e-reader, phone, or tablet, Read Print provides links to Amazon, where you can download a title for free if you're a member of Kindle Unlimited.
Archive.org's eBooks and Texts
Books across a wide variety of interests.
You can sort by view count or popularity.
Several downloading options.
It can be difficult finding exactly what you want from numerous search results.
Site can be slow to respond.
From the Internet Archive at Archive.org, eBooks and Texts is a library of fiction, popular books, children's books, historical texts, and academic books. The free books on this site span every possible interest.
You can sort these books by view count to see the most popular ones, as well as by title or date published. Another way to find free books to read here is through collections such as California Digital Library, Getty Research Institute, and Boston Public Library.
There are usually several download options if you don't want to read the book online, such as PDF, EPUB, and Kindle.
Questia
Good for researchers and librarians.
Offers tutorials for writing research papers.
Offers a topic idea generator.
Small collection compared to other sites on this list.
Some features are for paid subscribers.
Questia has long been a favorite choice of librarians and scholars for research help. They also offer a world-class library of free books filled with classics, rarities, and textbooks. More than 5,000 free books are available here, categorized by topic and viewable from their website.
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