Friday, March 07, 2008

Free E-Books

No, I'm not talking about some cheesy looking website like this one. I'm talking about real, honest to goodness free books.

So, here's a small list I've compiled so far. Feel free to add to it as you see fit.

- Project Gutenberg (basically books that are out of copyright, like say Mark Twain)
- Librivox (the audio version of Gutenberg books)
- Baen's Free Library (primarily older sci-fi and fantasy books)
- TOR's Free Books (you'll need to sign up, but it's free - so far I've gotten sci-fi and fantasy books - they just send a link in your email)
- Nightshade's Free Books (not many so far, but I'd expect to see more)
- Jeff VanderMeer's The Situation (via Wired's Geek Dad)
- Kurt R. A. Giambastiani's short stories (a very under appreciated spec fic writer)
- S. M. Stirling's previews (granted, they are just previews, but, I read half of Sunrise Lands before buying the book)

So there you have it, a short list of free books. Feel free to add to it with anything you find out there. I've used all of these with varying degrees of success/satisfaction. Right now, I'd say the free books from TOR are the best as they come right to me and are easy to download and read. Baen's appears to be the largest, but also the oldest (in terms of original publication dates). And yes, I know Stirling's site just has previews, just like every other author out there. But I wanted to draw attention to it since it is a great place to read more than just a sample chapter. In some cases, quite a few chapters.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello TK42One,

Because you are on the subject of free ebooks, I'd like to humbly mention that I give away my fantasy novel Union of Renegades as a free fantasy ebook in its entirety at www.braveluck.com

Thanks, Tracy

Neil Richard said...

By all means, mention away!

I'll also add some my Mom sent me.

http://literalsystems.org/abooks/index.php/Site/Titles
http://www.audiobooks.net/audiobooks_free.php

http://www.freeaudio.org/

http://www.bmw-audiobooks.com/