And it's for keeps, too; you're not just borrowing the book. Finally, there's Prime Reading, which differs from the Lending Library in a few key ways. First, it's not limited to Kindles: You can access the catalog of free e-books on phones, tablets and anything else capable of running a Kindle app.
Second, the selection includes not only books, but also a rotating selection of magazines, comics, travel guides, Kindle Singles and more. BookBub exists solely to inform you of free and discounted e-books. When you sign up for an account, you choose one or more preferred categories: crime fiction, romantic suspense, literary fiction, sci-fi and so on. Then you can get a daily or weekly email listing new deals that match your tastes.
Of course, you can also just browse the site. Got a library card? Then you may be able to sign up for Hoopla Digital , which allows you to check out a fixed number of e-books per month. You'll need the Hoopla app to read them -- it's available for Android, iOS and Fire -- and it lets you browse and borrow books directly. I won't say the selection is fabulous, but there's a lot of good stuff for tweens and young adults Jeff Kinney, Rick Riordan, etc.
As an added bonus, Hoopla also lets you check out audiobooks, movies and music. Library-powered OverDrive usually has a great selection of titles, but you may have to wait to get the ones you want. If your library doesn't offer Hoopla, there's a good chance it's hooked up with OverDrive instead. I'm lucky: My library offers both. Although fundamentally similar it offers audiobooks as well as e-books , OverDrive's catalog is dictated by your library -- which is to say it may offer fewer titles overall, but possibly more current ones.
Alas, as with a library's physical copies, there's only a fixed number of each title to go around; you may have to get on a waitlist to borrow one you want. But once it's available, you usually have the choice between getting an EPUB version or downloading it to your Kindle library for reading via the app or device of your choice.
There are thousands of ebooks available in the public domain, meaning their copyrights have expired and therefore you can access them for free. Project Gutenberg is one resource of many that digitizes and catalogs these books; the library currently contains over 55, titles. Riffle is a book-discovery service similar to GoodReads, but it also shares something in common with BookBub: an optional daily email digest listing free or discounted books based on your interests.
I use both services, and there's surprisingly little overlap between the two. Your mileage may vary, of course. Books you read for pleasure are expensive enough, but prices for textbooks can be downright ludicrous. The founders of Bookboon are fighting back by making academic books available at no cost whatsoever. It offers PDF versions of 1, textbooks by professors from top universities covering subjects like economics, engineering, and math.
Bookboon also offers a subscription service for business-related books. If you like a book so much you want to keep it, you can download it for an additional fee. Your first month is free. The book-review site Goodreads has a collection of 2, e-books you can read online or download.
Goodreads offers both classics and new works by little-known authors. Many of the reads here are fan fiction, such as the numerous books based on J. There are also many foreign-language books. Typing a title or author into the search bar searches the entire site, not just the free section. Google Books is a collection of more than 25 million books that have been scanned and converted to searchable files.
Not all those books are available to read in full, however. With most books, all you can do is search the text and view a preview — from a few lines to several pages — containing your search term. However, if you find a book you like on Google Books, the site can help you find a copy of it.
If the book is in the public domain, you can view the full text on the screen or download a PDF copy. If you still had to buy a special device just to read e-books, the savings on the books would likely not be enough to pay for it. There are now free apps that can display just about any e-book right on your computer, tablet, or phone. These days, most e-books are in a format called ePub. It works on basically all e-readers and with all e-book apps.
But other e-book formats still exist. Also, many free e-books are formatted as PDFs. Or you can read them right in most browsers. E-books are an excellent addition to an existing book collection, not a replacement for it.
I can check out my local e-library, consult Project Gutenberg, and see what various e-book vendors have to offer. Skip to content Advertiser Disclosure Advertiser Disclosure: The credit card and banking offers that appear on this site are from credit card companies and banks from which MoneyCrashers. This compensation may impact how and where products appear on this site, including, for example, the order in which they appear on category pages. Advertiser partners include American Express, Chase, U.
Bank, and Barclaycard, among others. By Amy Livingston. Jump to. Sign Up. Stay financially healthy with our weekly newsletter. Amy Livingston. Amy Livingston is a freelance writer who can actually answer yes to the question, "And from that you make a living?
She also maintains a personal blog, Ecofrugal Living , on ways to save money and live green at the same time. Discover More.
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