3 Answers2025-08-08
I’m a digital classic buff. To ensure that I can continue to read these on my favorite devices, I rely on the publishers who release their e-books without Digital Rights Management (DRM). There are many great titles available from two of my favorite DRM-free publishers, Project Gutenberg and Standard Ebooks.
Also, as a reader of indie literature, I rely on many publishers who release complete works of single authors as e-books in DRM-free format, like Delphi Classics’ complete works of Shakespeare, all in one e-book file. I can also find many DRM-free e-books and classics on Smashwords, if I search carefully through the many e-books published by individual authors and smaller presses there.
For audiobooks, I rely on the volunteer narrations at LibriVox. For example, all of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is available for download here. Not all publishers, even of classics, offer their materials without DRM, but these options exist and are beautiful.
6 Answers2025-06-07
The Internet Archive has launched an incredible project called the Open Library, a ‘digital lending library of almost full catalog of books ever printed’. While it hasn’t got any of the new ebooks yet (that will follow in a few months), you can borrow modern ebooks published this year for two weeks and read them with their simple browser-based reader (after you’ve made a free account to the Open Library). Waitlists will apply for the most popular items, just as with printed copies in regular libraries, but it’s a legitimate and legal way to access recently-published titles online for free. The reader isn’t fancy, but it works. I’ve borrowed the latest bestsellers via this method.
4 Answers2025-06-02
My Boox eReader has tons of free eBooks, including lots of audio books, from sites like Librivox, as well as the free section of Google Play Books. I also have tons of free public domain anthologies of 19th century literature by tons of now-obscure authors. Lots of writers are giving away free eBooks to their newsletter subscribers – for example, Brandon Sanderson just gave away a whole novel to his subscribers.
6 Answers2025-07-02
If all you want to borrow are audiobooks, then for pure audiobook lending, Libby is your best choice. But you should also check to see if your library still subscribes to RBdigital, now often rebranded, which offers magazines and audiobooks through a separate app. Downloads from the app work just fine offline. Note that the catalog offered through RBdigital may be different from what’s on Libby, though. It’s another tool in your quiver to ask your local library to tell you what digital media services they subscribe to. They want you to use them!
10 Answers2025-07-10
Also don’t forget you can sign up for a free trial of Kindle Unlimited which is a huge library of millions of books (including a lot of indie webnovels published to Amazon) to read for free within the Kindle app for one month or so. Many popular Wattpad stories end up on Amazon Kindle as well.
You can download the Kindle app and sign up for the free Kindle Unlimited trial. For one month you can read as many full length books as you want from a selection of millions of titles including a huge selection of indie webnovels published to Amazon. Remember to cancel Kindle Unlimited when the month is up, but in the meantime you can read 10-15 full length novels of your choice – from paranormal romance to military sci-fi. Just be sure to cancel at the end of the trial period.
4 Answers2025-08-18
Need to read something for free offline? Borrow e-books and graphics from your local library using free app ‘Libby’ or read classics for free on ‘Project Gutenberg’. Also manga is cached for offline reading on ‘Manga Plus’ and e-book EPUB files are read offline with ‘FBReader’. Kindle and Google Play Books also can read books offline too. Simple.
10 Answers2025-07-28
By free, I really mean free. Lots of "free" textbooks, etc., are actually just old or pirated versions of paid work, posted by unaffiliated or even scams sites. So, scan of of a reputable publisher like McGraw Hill (often in textbook reserve rooms at the universities' libraries) would be your "free"est option. Heavily scanned pages are blurry, etc. The worst part is that lots of the "free" options can have hidden viruses. But scanned copies of books are all you get for free with really good textbooks. Take pictures of the chapters you need with your phone at the library and you're done.
Your prof may have an extra copy of the eBook code from their rep. Be nice to them after class and explain your financial constraints. They may be able to get you temporary access to the required eBook or even better direct you to an alternative resource that the prof knows about.
4 Answers2025-07-10
For older manga novels that are still in print, try searching for “Internet Archive” to find free, legal, and high quality scans of the work. For classic manga that is fan-translated, there is MangaDex, Comic Walker (official free chapters), and Bato.to (more of a community-driven project). Remember to always check if the content is legal before reading.
7 Answers2025-06-03
There’s an app for reading the internet these days. But, the internet is a website. So, go to a website with your browser. Your browser history is your ‘continue reading’ button. Your bookmarks are your library. This back-to-basics approach is very liberating. It cuts through all the noise of the optimized reading experience and lets you get back to reading. The simplest tool is often the best, and for reading on the internet, that tool has been your web browser for decades. Sure, you need an internet connection, but these days you’ve got 5G and WiFi just about everywhere, so it’s not much of a hardship. In fact, managing all the different accounts for all the apps you use to read the internet on different devices is probably more of a hardship than finding a website to read and using your browser to read it.
5 Answers2025-08-19
For free e-books that are a mix of old and new, I recommend checking out the public domain books that Standard Ebooks has beautifully formatted for the modern reader. For free manga, MangaDex and ComiCake have plenty of fan-translated works available (just use an ad blocker and be aware that the legality of these is somewhat in question). For free audiobooks, the volunteer recordings at Librivox are great for listening to while doing other things. And many university websites offer free texts by professors and students, including literature and philosophy books at MIT OpenCourseWare. You can download these and then transfer them to your tablet using a cable or by emailing them to yourself.