25 Best Sites to Download Free Ebooks

The search box is basic and the only other way to find books is by scrolling through the author list.

Where to download free ebooks illegal

Reddit and its partners use cookies and similar technologies to provide you with a better experience.

By accepting all cookies, you agree to our use of cookies to deliver and maintain our services and site, improve the quality of Reddit, personalize Reddit content and advertising, and measure the effectiveness of advertising.

By rejecting non-essential cookies, Reddit may still use certain cookies to ensure the proper functionality of our platform.

For more information, please see our Cookie Notice and our Privacy Policy .

25 Best Sites to Download Free Ebooks

yellow warning triangle

Before we start, let’s get the legal stuff out of the way: Nanowerk will not be held liable for data breaches, infected/hacked devices, or ISP logging caused by using unverified 3rd party applications or streaming websites. We at Nanowerk do not endorse or encourage piracy at any level or in any form. While looking for media downloading websites, all the responsibility falls on you to check the copyright and legal status of the content(s) you access!

And while we have checked the free book websites in our download list below, we cannot guarantee they are all safe at the time you are reading this. That’s why we can’t emphasize enough that you protect yourself with a VPN (Virtual Private Network) prior to visiting these sites. This will hide your streaming and download activities and protect you from website operators, hackers, and your ISP.

Please note: Downloading copyrighted content with an illegal book downloading site is an offense, and you may face legal sanctions when caught. While we recommend using a VPN to stream and download content from websites, this list is for free ebook websites that fall within the public domain, as we never encourage using pirated content.

Also, check out our 25 Best Free Streaming Sites to Watch Movies and TV Shows Online. If you are an Anime fan be sure to check out our list of 25 Top Anime Streaming Sites to Watch Free Anime. If you are a sports fan, you might want to have a look at our 25 Best Free Sports Streaming Sites. And for music fans, we have compiled the 20 Best Free Sites to Download Music Legally. For staying in touch with friends & family, check out our 15 Best Sites and Apps to make free phone calls. As a Windows user you might be interested in our 12 Best Driver Update Tools. You a gamer? Check out the 8 Best Streaming Sites to Watch Video Gaming. For free and legal music streaming sites check out The 15 Largest Free Music Streaming Services.

Here is an overview (detailed descriptions are below the table; sorted alphabetically):

List of Best Websites to Legally Download E-Books for Free

Name Content Audiobooks Online Reader
Amazon Kindle Unlimited 2+ million ebooks, audiobooks and magazines Yes Yes
Audiobooks.com Free 30-day trial gets you 3 free audiobooks & unlimited access to all other audio entertainment Yes No
Authorama A good selection of high-quality, free books you can read right in your browser No Yes
Barnes & Noble Download thousands of free ebooks online in any genre for adults and kids of all ages No No
BookRix Tens of thousands free ebooks online in many languages No Yes
eBooks.com A selection of hundreds of free popular classics No Yes
Feedbooks Thousands of titles that are in the public domain No No
Free Computer Books This site is a directory of hyperlinks to free ebooks, tutorials, and lecture notes, etc No No
Free-Ebooks.net Free ebook library with downloads from thousands of authors across 124 categories Yes Yes
Google Play Books Features a section with free ebook downloads Yes Yes
HathiTrust Digital Library Offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world No Yes
International Children’s Digital Library A large digital library of outstanding children’s books from around the world. No Yes
Internet Archive Over 20 million freely downloadable books and texts plus a collection of 2.3 million modern eBooks that may be borrowed Yes Yes
Kobo A wide selection of free ebooks Yes Yes
LibriVox A large selection of free audiobooks in multiple languages Yes No
ManyBooks A library of close to 50,000 free eBooks No Yes
Open Culture 800 Free eBooks and 1000 free audiobooks for iPad, Kindle & other devices Yes No
Open Library This universal catalog provides links to discover, borrow, and read from the Internet Archive’s collections Yes Yes
Overdrive Explore millions of books online for free with a library card Yes Yes
Project Gutenberg More than 60,000 downloadable eBooks available in a wide variety of formats No Yes
Read Print Large selection of classic texts and books with Creative Commons licenses No Yes
Sacred Texts Large selection of classic texts and books with Creative Commons licenses No Yes
Scribd A 30-day free trial subscription to 1+ million ebooks, 200K audiobooks and 1+ million articles Yes Yes
Smashwords The world’s largest distributor of indie ebooks with almost 90,000 free titles No No
The Online Books Page Listing over 3 million free books on the Web available for download in dozens of different formats No No
Wikisource An online library of user-submitted and maintained texts No Yes

Reviews of the 25 Best Sites to Legally Download Free E-Books and Audiobooks

Amazon Kindle Store Review

Amazon Kindle

Amazon Kindle Unlimited offers a free 30-day trial that allows you unlimited reading, unlimited listening, and magazine subscriptions.

Free Kindle books are offered in the Amazon Kindle Store in two sections: the ‘Free Popular Classics’ page and its list of Top 100 Free Best Sellers.

Authorama Review

Authorama

All the classic literature featured on this site, as well as illustrations within the book pages, are in the public domain. Other texts are Creative Commons licensed by Authorama.com

Authorama offers a good selection of free books from a variety of authors, both current and classic, written in HTML and XHTML – which means they’re in an easily readable format. Most books here are featured in English, but there are quite a few German language texts as well.

The search box is basic and the only other way to find books is by scrolling through the author list.

Barnes & Noble Review

Barnes & Noble

Download thousands of free eBooks in any genre for adults and kids of all ages.

In order to take advantage of this offer, you must have a valid NOOK account with a credit card on file. For those who do not have a NOOK account, please follow the prompts to create an account for free. The free eBooks will be delivered to your NOOK device or NOOK app.

BookRix Review

BookRix

BookRix is a free self publishing platform that offers eBook distribution services to independent writers.

Locating a book on BookRix is simple when using the search field. You can find a book using the authors username, author name, book title, or keywords.