4 Answers2025-06-07
I get to listen to free audiobooks on the site of a wonderful volunteer-run library of public domain books: Librivox. Here you can find free audiobooks of classics like ‘Dracula’ and ‘The Secret Garden’ as well as many others read by volunteers in different voices and styles. There is also Loyal Books – a website that offers free ebooks and audiobooks for children as well as classic novels. Many authors also post free samples of their audiobooks on Audible’s website as well as on their YouTube channels. And if you have a local library, you can also access free audiobooks and ebooks through their apps including Hoopla, which has a large collection of audiobooks as well as ebooks, music, movies and more that you can download or stream for free with just a library card.
12 Answers2025-08-11
I have mentioned used bookstores on here before, but for online/free the Internet Archive’s Open Library is a great digital lending library of books, which you can borrow in digital format for a set time period. It has a decent selection of finance books, particularly older ones and seminal works. You do need to create an account which is free and the Open Library is a non-profit project. In addition to these used bookstores, corporate annual reports and even individual shareholder letters can be very valuable. For instance the letters from Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway are available on the Berkshire website for free every year, and are an amazing insight into the world of investment and business. In raw and unstructured form they are even more insightful than 99% of the finance books available today.
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.
9 Answers2025-05-01
Pivoting slightly – have you considered audio dramas or even audio book versions of these light novels? For example, while there are hardly any light novel audio dramas available in English, many very popular Chinese and Japanese light novels have full-cast audio drama versions. Often these have been fan-subbed and uploaded to YouTube or Bilibili with subtitles, so it’s easy to find and watch for free. These are a different medium to reading the novels themselves, but all telling the same story and in some ways even better. Then there are also the many YouTube channels reading out light novel chapters – often amateur but completely free to watch, and perfect for when you’ve been reading for hours and your eyes are tired, but you still want that fix of a good story. Such videos are scattered everywhere and of very uneven quality, but there must be hundreds of thousands of them out there.
3 Answers2025-05-14
There are lots of free websites where you can read books online without signing up to a website first. For classic books that are no longer copyrighted there’s the wonderful Project Gutenberg (long established) and ManyBooks (my current favorite with a great variety of free books of many different types in different formats too). For free audiobooks there’s Librivox, which features free public domain audiobooks for download, all of them read by volunteers.
On the other hand, Open Library allows users to borrow digital books, many of which can be checked out by users without an account. Additionally, Classic Shorts offers short stories and essays that users can instantly read online for free without having to sign up for anything.
5 Answers2025-07-11
If you’re looking for free English stories to read online, Project Gutenberg is a great starting point – there are thousands of free classics here to choose from. For more contemporary stories, Wattpad is great to look around, and fanfiction is catered for on AO3. If you’re after some short science fiction or fantasy stories, then you should check out ‘Tor.com’ for free reads online, as well as libraries offering free digital loans from Open Library, and stories from Medium’s creative section, each story briefly told to read online. There are lots of choices online here, so look around to find out what type of stories online that you enjoy most.
5 Answers2025-07-09
Looking for free Christian audiobooks? Check out the free section on Audible, or the public domain books on Google Play Books. “Hinds’ Feet on High Places” by Hannah Hurnard is a great example of a free Christian audiobook. Many Christian radio stations also feature sections of free audiobooks on their websites. Follow Christian publishers like Thomas Nelson or Zondervan on social media for promotions when they give away free audiobooks. Websites like Open Culture put together lists of free audiobooks, which include a wide selection of Christian titles, both new and classic.
11 Answers2025-08-13
I use a somewhat old-school method here at The Rap Sheet. To begin with, I keep a personal spreadsheet of my own library. When I’m not sure whether I have a certain book or not, I first check the ISBN on that spreadsheet. If that fails, I immediately search for the book on AbeBooks, because – as a marketplace for used and rare books – the sellers here are highly accurate with regard to the ISBN of the copy they are selling.
Looking through a few listings confirms the ISBN number for me. The listing for a used book also includes a photo of the cover. In this case, it is easy enough to tell that one listing is for a hardcover edition and the other for a paperback edition. I prefer browsing a used bookstore this way as opposed to a purely digital search for an ISBN.
7 Answers2025-07-17
You can also use Bing Search.
2 Answers2025-05-21
A search for rare books online can take a lot of time, especially if you know where to look. So I thought it would be a good idea to list some of the search spots I use regularly. There’s Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive, which offer lots of free rare books. The Open Library allows you to borrow rare books online in the form of e-books. Digitized versions of rare books from university libraries like the Harvard University Library Digital Collections can also be accessed online for free. In addition, there are many online forums like the community of the rare books forum on Reddit (r/rarebooks), where one can find tips and links to search spots.