8 Sites That Offer Free Ebooks and Audiobooks
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Free ebooks and audiobooks are great, right?
Here in this blog post, you will find links to sites that offer ebooks and audiobooks for FREE! Some of the sites require you to sign up, while others have no strings attached. I personally prefer not signing up for things, but in some cases it is worth it. The sites that I will link to, cost you nothing except perhaps your email address.
Just a quick disclaimer, most of the free ebooks and audiobooks are in the public domain, meaning they are not subject to copyright. Most such books are considered classics and most are at least over 50 years old or more.
The first site you can get free ebooks, and even audiobooks is Overdrive.com. On this site, you can get hundreds of current and in print ebooks and audiobooks. They don’t have to be in the public domain, the only thing it requires from you is a valid library card. I realise that in some places a library card is not free, but if you already have one, Overdrive won’t cost you anything.
I think loyalbooks.com is by far my favorite site to get free ebooks and audiobooks from. They offer a variety of public domain books, in several formats that you download instantly.
Librivox.org is my go to site for free audiobooks that are in the public domain. Loyalbooks.com actually link to librivox when it comes to audiobooks.
The next place where you can find free ebooks is Project Gutenberg. You might even have already heard about this one, as it is fairly popular. All of the books available are in the public domain, so as I mentioned in the disclaimer above, these books are in the 50 years old, and above crowd.
Openlibrary.org presents hundreds of free ebooks. Most of the ebooks you can download instantly, while others you can borrow for two weeks at a time. You have to sign up in order to borrow books, but if they are available to read, then you can just download them.
Manybooks.net offers lots of great public domain ebooks in various genres. All it requires is for you to create an account, and then you have access to hundreds of books at your fingertips.
You can actually find some free ebooks on amazon. Quite a few of the classics are available as ebooks for free. However, you have to sift through a lot of rubbish to find them and I find that amazon.com especially has vastly reduced the amount of ebooks you can get for free recently. The odd time, they have flash deals where books that wouldn’t normally be free are free, but other than that, I suggest you stick to some of the other sites I recommended.
Books that you can get free on amazon that are not usually free anywhere else:
From amazon.com
>> The Mystery of Smugglers Cove by Paul Moxham
>> The Mystery of the Missing Money by Paul Moxham
From amazon.ca
>> The Mystery of Smugglers Cove by Paul Moxham
>> The Mystery of the Missing Money by Paul Moxham
Below is a list of classics that you can get from amazon for free on either amazon.ca or amazon.com.
From amazon.ca
>> Little Women by Louisa M. Alcott
>> The Call of the Wild by Jack London
>> Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery
>> Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
>> Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
>> Persuasion by Jane Austen
>> Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
>> Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
>> Emma by Jane Austen
>> Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
>> The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
>> Treasure Island by R. L. Stevenson
>> Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
>> Dracula by Bram Stocker
>> Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
>> The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
>> Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
>> Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne
>> Around the World in Eighty Days by Julues Verne
>> Heidi by Johanna Spyri
Classics you can get on amazon.com (note: this isn’t all of them)
>> Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
>> Emma by Jane Austen
>> Persuasion by Jane Austen
>> Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
>> Treasure Island by R. L. Stevenson
>> Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
>> Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
>> The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
>> Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne
While this last site does not strictly offer free audiobooks, you can get one or even two (depending on the deal) free audiobooks with an Audible trial. If you haven’t tried Audible yet, I suggest you do.
There are plenty more sites and services that offer free ebooks, but I chose not include some of them for several reasons including, having to pay money (for free ebooks? Really?), obnoxious websites with annoying ads everywhere, or they just seemed kinda sketchy.
One site in particular I suggest you avoid is Free-ebooks.net. The reason for this is that they require you to create a ‘free’ account right away, when you sign up, they only give you 5 free ebooks in either pdf or txt format, neither of which are great. The quality of the ebooks is terrible, and the covers are disgraceful. Beyond this, they offer mostly trash, with the odd good thing buried out of sight.
I hope you found this post helpful. If so, leave a comment, and share this post with your friends. Thanks for reading!
Happy Reading & Writing!
2 Comments
Samantha
I knew amazon has some free classics, but I didn’t know about the others sites. OpenLibrary looks awesome. Thanks for sharing!
April
Thank you for compiling these! I was looking for this info last year and it was scattered all over the internet, so I appreciate how you have it put together in one place!!