Subject Guides » Books » E-books

Our Favorites Sources of E-books

• C/W Mars Digital Catalog (Overdrive)
  http://digitalcatalog.cwmars.org/
  C/W Mars Digital Catalog includes downloadable e-books, audiobooks, and video. Requires a library card from a C/W Mars library (like Forbes).
• Google books
  http://books.google.com/
  A vast collection of books digitized by Google, many of which can be downloaded as a PDF or EPUB e-book
  
  
• Project Gutenberg
  http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/
  Is a volunteer effort to transcribe public domain books and make them available as e-books in a variety of formats. Search this site to find and download over 20,000 free books!
  
  

Additional Sources of E-books

Selected by Forbes Library staff. You may suggest an addition or change to this list.

• BAEN Free Library
  http://www.baen.com/library/
  Free e-books from science fiction publisher Bean. These titles are available freely online and are downloadable in a number of formats, without restrictions.
  
  
• Book Lending
  http://www.booklending.com/
  A website that matches lenders and borrows of Kindle e-books.
  
  
• Book Yards
  http://www.bookyards.com/index.html
  A collection of free e-books. Contains many classic titles, but also lets users upload and distribute their own books.
  
  
• Digital Book Index
  http://www.digitalbookindex.com/about.htm
  A site that provides links to more than 165,00 full-text digital books. Supports iPad, Kindle and Nook readers.
  
  
• E-Discover the Classics
  http://www.clicweb.org/e-discover-home/
  The Colorado Library Consortium and Douglas County (Colo.) collaborated to create this site which contains 500 classics by authors such as Twain, Austen and O. Henry.
  
  
• epubBooks.com
  http://www.epubbooks.com/
  A site devoted to providing e-books in EPUB format.
  
  
• Flat World Knowledge
  A provider free e-books for use as college texts. Books are written by expert authors, peer-reviewed, and professionally edited and developed.
  
  
• Free-eBooks.net
  http://www.free-ebooks.net/
  Unlimited access to e-books in HTML format and access to five e-books every month in PDF or TXT formats.
  
  
• HathiTrust
  http://www.hathitrust.org/
  HathiTrust is a partnership of major research institutions and libraries. The HathiTrust Digital Library brings together the immense collections of partner institutions in digital form.
  
  
• Inkmesh
  http://inkmesh.com/
  This search engine can find free e-books as well as compare prices for the Kindle, Nook, Sony Reader and other devices.
  
  
• International Children's Digital Library
  http://en.childrenslibrary.org/
  A collection of children's books from around the world with a kid friendly interface.
  
  
• The Internet Archive
  http://www.archive.org/
  The Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.
  
  
• Many Books
  http://manybooks.net/
  A free e-book site. Many titles come from project Gutenberg.
  
  
• Munseys
  http://www.munseys.com/
  Offering 20,000 titles in twelves formats.
  
  
• Neotake
  A powerful search engine for finding e-books in a variety of formats. Search results may include free and non-free books. You can limit your results to free titles only if you want.
• The Online Books Page
  http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/
  A website that facilitates access to books that are freely readable over the Internet.
  
  
• Open Library
  http://openlibrary.org/
  An online site of more than one million books.
  
  
• Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library
  http://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/books/browse
  The National Yiddish Book Center is a non-profit organization working to rescue Yiddish books and share their content with the world. More than 10,000 titles are now available free-of-charge through the Open Content Alliance.