Free E-Books and E-Book Resources

by Sam Dean - Feb. 25, 2009Comments (3)

Recently, e-book readers have become substantially more popular than they every were before. Amazon's new version of its Kindle reader is getting good reviews, and many people like the Sony Reader. You don't necessarily have to buy a piece of expensive hardware and pay for books to enjoy e-books, though. If you commute with a laptop, a netbook, or tote a portable phone with you, there are several free and open source resources for reading e-books. Here are several good ones to know about.

Google Book Search is emerging as one of the most popular free ways to read books, on either a computer or a portable phone. Google currently has 1.5 million e-books available. You can find out more in this post and if you have an iPhone or T-Mobile G1 Android phone. To try Google Book Search out on an iPhone or G1, click here in your browser. You'll find titles in many categories, including General Fiction, Philosophy, Classics, Business & Economics and more.

Project Gutenberg is a long-standing volunteer effort to make free online versions of books available. The site has over 27,000 free e-books, and you can typically get them in various formats. Nearly all the books are available in text (ascii) format, and HTML format. Most of the books are also available for Plucker, which is free e-book reader software for Palm, Windows Mobile and other portable devices. YBook (for Windows) is also popular freeware e-book reader software that works with the formats found on Project Gutenberg. For reading on a netbook that I carry around, I find the HTML versions of books at Project Gutenberg to work fine, and I prefer reading on a 10-inch netbook screen to reading on smaller screens such as the Sony Reader's.

Bookworm is free, open source software for reading e-books published in the ePub format. You can take a tour of how it works here. It's optimized for reading e-books on any mobile phone that can access the web. You can find both commercial and free providers of ePub books here.

Last year, ReadManiac went open source. It's electronic book reader software for Java-enabled phones. ReadManiac links to several libraries with its Book Search engine, including Project Gutenberg and Russian libraries. I personally prefer to read e-books on a larger netbook screen, but increasingly people are reading on phones. ReadManiac's installation routine is a bit kludgey, but it works well once installed, and there could be an opportunity for the open source community to build on this application.