10 Places To Get Free eBooks

Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg has free downloads of public domain works in .txt .html and .epub formats. They were all created by volunteers over the past 15+ years.  These aren’t high quality digital books, but they are free and without DRM, so you can read them on just about any device.

Scribd

Scribd is a service where users can upload their own documents to share with others. You can download those documents or embed them into your website. Not all of the documents are books, but there are lots of books included.

GetFreeEbooks

This site has all legal free downloadable ebooks. I couldn’t find anything on the website saying which formats the ebooks are in, but my guess is that most are PDF.

eBookMall.com

This is a small but growing collection of free ebooks. Downloads are either PDF or ePub. Some are samples but most are full books by modern authors.

MemoWare

MemoWare has a ton of documents and files that are formatted for different devices. They used to advertize devices like Palm and Pocket PC, but now their website says their files also work on Kindle and Nook.

Free Kindle eBooks

Amazon has an entire section of their website with free Kindle ebooks.

Adobe Sample eBook Library

Adobe has a collection of free sample ebooks that you can download for Adobe Digital Editions. They are PDF and ePub formats.

eBookLobby.com

Free ebooks organized into categories. Some are online and some are links to other websites for a download.

Online Books Page

This is a big index of free books that you can find online or for download in PDF format. You could kind of consider it a Wikipedia for free ebooks.

Free online personality test

Here is a great free online personality test that will help you find out your personality type according to the Myers Briggs theory based on Jung.

Free-eBooks.net

With the free account option you can get access to HTML ebooks and up to 5 downloads in PDF or TXT.

The Top 5 Reasons Why Your eBook Isn’t Opening — #5: The eBook File is Corrupted or The Download Link is Bad

This is an article series that will explain the most common reasons why ebook users have trouble opening an ebook that was purchased from an ebook retail website. Most of these issues are easily avoided by simply following your download instructions, installing the software you need, and making sure that you’re using the correct ebook format for your eReader. This post covers reason #5: The eBook File is Corrupted or The Download Link is Bad.

These are the least commons reason why your ebook isn’t opening correctly, but they do happen from time to time.

Sometimes the website selling the ebook will have made a mistake in the download link, which will cause it to not work when you attempt to download your ebook. Even the people running ebook websites are humans, so mistakes can be made. Sometimes the problem originated before it even got to the ebook store. When a book publisher wants to sell their books as ebooks, often they list their ebooks with a company that distributes ebooks and provides DRM on the downloads. The book publisher must provide the distributor with all of the pertinent information about the ebook, including the file name. If that file name is provided incorrectly, it will still be incorrect when it gets to the ebook store.

Sometimes the ebook file itself has become corrupted. These files have to be sent from the book publisher to the distributor to the ebook store, and they go through a lot of different servers during that time, they’re stored in multiple databases, and the download happens through multiple pieces of software. It is a bit of a miracle that the files don’t get corrupted a lot more than they do. If you end up with an ebook file that has become corrupted and won’t open, keep this in mind.

However, remember that these occurrences are not common. The majority of the time, when an ebook isn’t opening the reason is that the user is trying to open it with the wrong software or the wrong e-reader device. For example, if you try to open a DRM-protected PDF file with Adobe Reader, the program will give you a message that the file is corrupt. In this case, the file is not actually corrupt — that’s just the only way that Adobe Reader knows how to tell you that it can’t open the file when it’s meant for Adobe Digital Editions.

If you’ve found this post through Google and haven’t yet read through the more common reasons why your ebook isn’t opening, please check those out first before you assume that your ebook file is corrupted. See all posts in this series.