I just noticed an advert in the adsense I use on my site that is offering 12,000+ ebooks on a DVD for £14.95. So I thought I’d take a look at the site. The image they use to show the DVD you are buying is obviously just a Lightscribe DVD they have burnt the books on to. A quick look at the ebooks they are charging you £14.95 shows that they are all in fact ebooks that are available to download for free anyway from sites such as Project Gutenberg. So apart from about £1 they paid for the blank DVD and then about £0.50 it would cost them to post it that’s about £13 profit in their pocket because of gullible people. A search on Ebay shows me that they are also trying to sell the same DVD on there as well.

If you want free ebooks then check out my previous post which contains links to sites offering both classic and new works for you to download for free.

I just thought I would share some of the sites I have found for downloading free ebooks. That is fiction ebooks and not reference ebooks as there are hundreds of sites offering reference ebooks as PDF files. With a few of the sites below they are just hosting ebook versions of classic books that are now out of copyright. Most sites just use the books from Project Gutenberg and reformat them for better reading. Quite a few of them give you a choice of what format you want to download the ebook in be it PDF, epub or just plain old txt. If you are looking for more original and modern stories to read then I recommend the first two links, Online Novels and Feedbooks.

Online Novels – Just discovered this excellent source of free ebooks novels.
Feedbooks – Not only does this site have the classics it’s also a good place to find new and original works.
getfreeebooks – Haven’t tried this site yet but looks promising.
ManyBooks – not looked at this site much but seems to have a good mix of classics and modern works.
Project Gutenberg – The main source of classics and they have their own proof readers. Poor formatting in their ebooks though.
epubBooks – Classics from Gutenberg but formatted for better reading and all in the epub format.

MobileRead also has a forum dedicated to free ebooks.

If you are lucky your local library might support the lending of ebooks using Overdrive. Have a look at http://search.overdrive.com/ to see if your local library is part of it.

Anyway if you know of any good sites for free ebooks from new authors then please share them.

Thanks to a couple I am friends with I now have a Sony PRS-600 ebook reader. Brilliant as my book shelves are full. Anyway I thought I would buy some books to go on it from some of my favourite authors. My first port of call was Waterstones where I did a quick search for Neal Asher. For the hardback copy of his book Orbus they are charging £16.19 (apparently saving me £1.80). For the ebook version which requires no manufacturing, incurs no transportation costs and they only need to keep a single copy of on the server they want £14.39 and WHSmith’s want £12.59 for the ebook version. How the hell can they justify this? Another of Neal Asher’s book, Brass Man, goes for £7.99 for the paperback and they want £6.39 for the ebook version but apparently it’s only that price because it’s in the sale The same ebook on WHSmith’s is £5.59.