Free
I have about 2,500 books on my hard drive. Most are in the public domain.
I did at one time have a web site strictly for the purpose of giving all of them away but ran into a little problem. Formatting them took about a week of spare time each on average. If I figure correctly, that would require about 50 years. When finished, I would be somewhat past 120 year old.
Time went by and far better resources became available. e-readers have caught on.
So, I am providing links to these resources. Some are of the books themselves. Some are of the e-readers. A couple of free synchronization programs. One is of a free file conversion program that you will really appreciate.
Project Gutenberg has over 33,000 books available – all free. These books are offered in several formats for use on your computer, Amazon’s Kindle, Barnes and Noble’s Nook, Sony’s Reader, even various phones. The formats include: ePub, Kindle, HTML and simple text formats. Gutenberg also has a group of affiliates that have over 100,000 free books. Some of these are in English but many are foreign organizations.
Amazon
Barnes and Noble has an estimated 1,000,000 free books. The Nook reads ePub, PDB and PDF but not DOC, LIT, TXT, AMZ (Amazon), LRZ/LRX (Sony). Barnes and Noble also sells e-books.
Sony has a book store listing several classics for $1.99. I could find no free books listed on their site but there are plenty of free books in various formats that Sony supports. The Reader supports txt, rtf, ePub and some PDF files.
I would recommend against other e-readers, as their market share does not inspire confidence in their long-term prospects.
Although there are numerous sites with varying numbers of titles available, one more must be listed.
Google has nearly 3 million free e-books. They come in ePub and PDF fomats. Google also sells e-books.
The differing file formats may be confusing at first. You may find a book listed in a format your e-reader or phone or computer doesn’t support. Not a problem.
There are programs available that will convert these files to one you can use.
Calibre is the most popular of the conversion programs. It is also free.
Calibre supports the conversion of many input formats to many output formats. It can convert every input format in the following list, to every output format.
Input Formats: CBZ, CBR, CBC, CHM, EPUB, FB2, HTML, LIT, LRF, MOBI, ODT, PDF, PRC**, PDB, PML, RB, RTF, SNB, TCR, TXT
Output Formats: EPUB, FB2, OEB, LIT, LRF, MOBI, PDB, PML, RB, PDF, SNB, TCR, TXT
** PRC is a generic format, Calibre supports PRC files with TextRead and MOBIBook headers.
It has several other features:
- Library Management
Calibre manages your e-book collection for you. It is designed around the concept of the logical book, i.e., a single entry in your library that may correspond to actual e-book files in several formats.
Calibre can sort the books in your library by:
Title, Author, Date added, Date published, Size, Rating, Series, etc.In addition, it supports extra searchable metadata:
Tags: A flexible system for categorizing your collection however you likeComments: A long form entry that you can use for book description, notes, reviews, etc.
You can easily search your book collection for a particular book. Calibre supports searching any and all of the fields mentioned above. You can construct advanced search queries by clicking the helpful “Advanced search” button to the left of the search bar.
You can export arbitrary subsets of your collection to your hard disk arranged in a fully customizable folder structure.
Finally, Calibre will even go out onto the internet to find book metadata based on existing title/author or ISBN information. It can download various types of metadata and covers for your books, automatically. The metadata system is written using plugins so that different types of metadata sources can be supported in the future.
- E-book conversion
Calibre can convert from a huge number of formats to a huge number of formats. It supports all the major e-book formats.
The conversion engine has lots of powerful features. It can rescale all font sizes, ensuring the output e-book is readable no matter what font sizes the input document uses. It can automatically detect/create book structure, like chapters and Table of Contents. It can insert the book metadata into a “Book Jacket” at the start of the book.
- Syncing to e-book reader devices
Calibre has a modular device driver design that makes adding support for different e-reader devices easy. It has support for a large number of devices. Syncing supports updating metadata on the device from metadata in the library and creation of collections on the device based on the tags defined in the library. If a book has more than one format available, Calibre automatically chooses the best format when uploading to the device. If none of the formats is suitable, Calibre will automatically convert the e-book to a format suitable for the device before sending it.
- Downloading news from the web and converting it into e-book form
Calibre can automatically fetch news from websites or RSS feeds, format the news into a ebook and upload to a connected device. The ebooks include the full versions of the articles, not just the summaries. Examples of supported news sites include:
- The New York Times
- The Wall Street Journal
- The Economist
- Time
- Newsweek
- The Guardian
- ESPN
- and many, many more…
Calibre has over three hundred news sources and the news system is plugin based, allowing users to easily create and contribute new sources to Calibre. As a result the collection of news sources keeps on growing!
- Comprehensive e-book viewer
Calibre has a built-in ebook viewer that can display all the major ebook formats. It has full support for Table of Contents, bookmarks, CSS, a reference mode, printing, searching, copying, customizing the rendering via a user style sheet, embedded fonts, etc.
- Content server for online access to your book collection
After comparing all of the e-readers, I chose the Amazon Kindle. Your choice may be different but there are some things to consider.
Sony’s pricing is so much higher than the Kindle and the Nook that it isn’t really competitive. It also does not now have the features of the others. I am reminded of Sony’s Betamax.
Battery life should be of utmost importance. The Kindle claims 28 days on a charge with the Wi-Fi turned off. It will be closer to 10 days with it turned on.
The others are considerably shorted for other reasons. Touch screens and color will seriously eat into the battery’s charge. I figured I was used to reading books in black and white. While the others have touch screens, the Kindle has a keyboard. One feature I discovered is that you may turn the screen so that the keyboard is to the top, bottom, left or right.
The Kindle’s lack of support for the ePub format is easily overcome by using Calibre to convert the file.
Other aspects:
You may download any of these formats to your computer, convert them and send them to your e-reader or phone. Both Kindle and Nook provide free programs that allow you to synchronize your various toys. You may stop reading on your computer and pick up the same page on your e-reader or phone.
These e-readers will also play MP-3 music files. They will display jpg and several other graphic files. You may also be able to play audio books.
I found that the Kindle has a feature of which I was unaware. It will read some files aloud. That might come in handy while driving, if you forgot to load an audiobook. Luckily, my car has a plug that permits me to plug in an MP-3 player to play over the car’s speaker system.
When I told my wife that the Kindle would hold 3,500 books, she asked if that meant we could get rid of all of these, meaning some of my 9,500 books in my home office. I explained that would require buying an awful lot of books that I already owned. I may go through my collection to replace those in the public domain.
I am more pleased with my e-reader than I had expected to be. Since I am writing this 3 days before Christmas, I guess I am affected by that spirit. If you purchase a Kindle