Best websites to download free books

Before the digital era having a huge library of books meant investing a whole lot of money but now that thousands of books are available for free to download you merely need plenty of time to read and enough space on your hard drive.

Thanks to an amendment to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, starting with 2019 we can access a wide variety of books that were previously unavailable to the public. The amendment allows works published between 1923 and 1977 to enter the public domain 95 years after their creation.

Best websites to download free books

Below we’ll be sharing some of the best websites to download free books and a lot of them will allow you to access thousands of books available under the act mentioned above.

1. ManyBooks

best websites to download free books

ManyBooks is a popular resource for books across various genres and all of them are free. It’s worth mentioning not all the books they list are creative commons or classic books which is pretty great.

The site allows you to browse books by genres but also other categories like editor’s picks, trending, and popular classics. You can download any of the available books in a variety of formats directly from the website or other sites such as Amazon and there’s also the option to read them online.

Visit ManyBooks

2. The Literature Network

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If you’re interested in searching books by author this website makes an excellent choice. Moreover, they also have other interesting categories such as periods & movements that are great for exploring.

For each author you will find all available works as well as a short bio and a quizz. Most available books are free although some can be downloaded for a small fee.

Visit The Literature Network

3. Read Print

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Read Print provides a huge selection of free books across various genres which are either Classics or creative commons licensed. If you register on the website you can keep track of the title’s you’ve read, add books to your favorites and even join online book clubs among other things.

While you can access the books they offer without registering, the features mentioned above won’t be available.

The website provides various options for finding and exploring books including a search function, a top books section, and top 250 most famous authors on Read Print.

All available books can be read online for free and if you’d like to download any of them, the site offers links to Amazon. Nevertheless, it’s worth mentioning that on Amazon you might need to pay for the book unless you have an Amazon Kindle Unlimited membership.

Visit Read Print

4. LibriVox

If you enjoy listening to audiobooks, LibriVox is certainly worthy of your attention.

The books provided by this website are 100% free thanks to its the team of volunteers that work hard to regularly release recordings of classic books.

Visit LibriVox

5. Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg has a vast library of free books that contains over 30,000 titles you can download in a range of formats. In fact, this website is among the oldest web libraries and while most of the titles are in English, it does have other languages as well.

The library is easy to explore as it lets you browse by author name, title, language, or subjects but there’s also a search function and an alphabetically sorted section called “bookshelves”.

Visit Project Gutenberg

6. International Digital Children’s Library

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This website is among the best when it comes to free children’s books and the best part is has a great search function.

Here, you’ll be able to find books sorted by age, genres, book length, reading level and other handy criteria.

Visit International Digital Children’s Library

7. Free Computer Books

If you’re into programming or anything else computer-related you should take a look at this website as it covers numerous topics and programming languages.

You will find the main categories listed at the top but there’s also a search function if you need to get more specific results.

Visit Free Computer Books

8. Authorama

Authorama.com is an online library that provides free public domain books in HTML and XHTML formats. The majority of the books are in English but there’s also a decent selection of German texts.

The books offered on Authorama can be read directly in your browser or printed. On the homepage, all the books are listed by alphabetically sorted authors and you’ll also find a ‘Latest Addictions’ section at the top.

If you’ve been searching for a high-quality selection of classic literature to read online, Authorama is one of the best place to find it.

Visit Authorama

9. Questia Public Library

Questia Public Library is a place many librarians and scholars visit for their research. This online library provides an extensive range of quality textbooks as well as classics and rarities. Here, you can explore over 5,000 free books alphabetically ordered by author and by title.

Visit Questia Public Library

10. The Open Library

The Open Library is literally huge having over one million free books available in several formats such as PDF, ASCII text, ePub, DjVu, and Daisy.

What’s interesting about this library is it also lets you filter your searches to show only ebooks.

Visit The Open Library

11. Wikibooks

For students, teachers, and researchers, Wikibooks can be an excellent place to find a wide selection of textbooks with subjects ranging from Science and Computing to Languages.

You can browse books sorted by subject and there’s also a featured books section showing the most popular books from the community.

Visit Wikibooks

12. Sacred Texts

Sacred Texts is a large online library that has a collection of books related to religion, mythology, folklore and the esoteric.

Visit Sacred Texts

13. Free eBooks

Free eBooks is a varied library of free books and standard membership is free and lets you read as many books as you want in HTML format but only five books per month in TXT and PDF formats.

A lifetime VIP membership is $49.95 and a yearly subscription is $39.95 which is definitely worth it if you enjoy the free membership and you want to remove the limitations.

Visit Free eBooks

14. eBooks and Text Archives

This website is a wonderfully diverse library of numerous types of books from academic books and historical texts to fiction, and children’s books.

Visit eBooks and Text Archives

15. The Online Books Page

This online book library is maintained by the University of Pennsylvania and has an impressive collection of over one million free books that can be downloaded in numerous file formats.

Visit The Online Books Page