11 Places to Find Free eBooks for Yourself and Your Students

The Internet is full of ebooks. Much to the chagrin of textbook publishers, some teachers are now using ebooks instead of issuing textbooks to students. Others are building their own etextbooks. If you would like to find some free ebooks that you and your students can use take a look at the following resources.

Planet eBook is a free service where teachers and students can find classic literature titles available as free downloads. Planet eBook adds new titles at regular intervals. Subscribe to the Planet eBook blog or newsletter to keep track of the latest additions to the collection. For browsing purposes, Planet eBook offers previews of titles through the Issuu pdf publishing service. Using the previews students can get an overview of a title without committing to downloading the entire ebook.

Flat World Knowledge provides free textbooks created by experts in various academic fields. A quick look at the student section of Flat World Knowledge reveals that these textbooks are already being used in few dozen colleges across the United States. Learn more in the video below.



E-Books Directory contains more than 6000 titles. The E-Books Directory provides freely downloadable textbooks, documents, and lecture notes. You can search the directory by keyword or browse through hundreds of categories.

Free Book-s is a search engine that scans many collections of ebooks to find free content that matches your search. I gave Free Book-s a test drive using academic terms like "physics" and terms like "fly fishing" to see what kids of results would be generated. In both cases I found Free Book-s returned very relevant results.

Google Books hosts thousands of books that are in the public domain. Many of the public domain books can be viewed and downloaded in their entirety for free. To find public domain books go into the advanced search options and select the "public domain only" and "full text" options to find free full-length books.

Free Book-s is a search engine that scans many collections of ebooks to find free content that matches your search. I gave Free Book-s a test drive using academic terms like "physics" and terms like "fly fishing" to see what kids of results would be generated. In both cases I found Free Book-s returned very relevant results.

Sciyo is a free service that allows scientists to publish their works and connect with other authors. Works published on Sciyo are made available for free to visitors. Visitors can download works as PDFs. There are currently 273 free books on Sciyo. The category of books that is probably of most interest to readers of this blog is Technology and Education. In the future videos will also be available on Sciyo.

Neotake is a search engine for ebooks that offers a nice community option. Neotake provides the option to become a member (free registration) of a community that ranks and reviews ebooks. Registered members can also network with other readers.

Many Books is a service that has indexed more than 29,000 free ebooks that are available in a variety of formats for a variety of devices. The books that you will find through Many Books are works that are either in the public domain or have been licensed for free distribution. You can search Many Books by title, author, genre, or language.

The Open Library is a part of the Internet Archive. The Open Library is a collection of more than one million free ebook titles. The collection is cataloged by a community of volunteer online librarians. The ebooks in the Open Library can be read online, downloaded to your computer, read on Kindle and other ereader devices, and embedded into other sites. Some of the ebooks, like Treasure Island, can also be listened to through the Open Library.

The University of Adelaide in Australia has compiled a list of more than 100 classic titles that are available in electronic form. The list is arranged by author. Clicking on an author's name reveals biographical information and links to the author's work available in electronic form. Some of the authors that you will find in the list inlcude Yeats, Darwin, Voltaire, and Poe.