Amazon’s Kindle has made downloading books onto a special reading device the newest fad, but entire libraries of books have been available for download since the internet first arrived. Most of the books that are available for free are older books and often are not easily found in print. You don’t need a fancy device to download and read these books, all you need is an internet connection and Word or Adobe Reader. This is a great way to find a copy of a well-loved favorite, or less popular books by well-known authors.
I did a couple of searches and found several old favorites easily available for download including Agatha Christi and Mary Roberts Rinehart. I also looked up the classic Western saga “The Virginian” by Owen Wister and discovered to my surprise that he had written several other books. I’ve never seen anything but “The Virginian” in the public library, and I had assumed he had only written the one book. I immediately downloaded a couple of his works.
Here are some sites to try:
http://www.gutenberg.org The Gutenberg Project has over 30,000 titles in 50 languages available for free download.
http://www.free-ebooks.net/ has mostly non-fiction titles and a few classic fiction authors including Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw.
www.harlequincelebrates.com is a promotional site for Harlequin Romance. They are offering over a dozen free books downloadable as a PDF or in eReader or MSReader formats.
Try these sites and let me know what you think, and if you know of any other interesting resources for readers and writers, feel free to email me and I’ll make sure to share them in the next edition of this newsletter.