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10 sites where you can read books online for free
To read good books, you don’t need to buy a kindle membership, or a tablet or an e-reader. You can read almost any novel online or through apps without having to pay anything.
In the era of the Internet, social media, and helpful forums, it is really easy to find and read books online for free. More and more people are ready to digitally scan their personally owned books and upload them at websites where more people can read them for free. There are millions of people in the world that don’t have access to bookstores, libraries or don’t have the money to buy books. But these apps and apps make it easy for such people to continue their passion for reading.
To read online means that all you need is an internet connection and a mobile, a desktop, laptop, or tablet device with an internet browser like Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer and Firefox.
Many books with expired Intellectual property rights fall in the public domain. You can read such books online, it's really easy to find PDF versions of such books. If you are unable to find such books on your own, you can check the titles available with Institutions like Project Gutenberg or Internet Archive who digitize public domain books and make them available for free through their online websites.
In the case of paid books, free book previews are easy to find; they usually consist of 10% of the book’s story. By reading the book summary you can decide whether it is worth looking for.
Here is the list of ten websites or apps to read books online for free:
Project Gutenberg
Founding year: 1971
The first e-book created - “Declaration of Independence of the United States of America”.
Total books available at Project Gutenberg: 45,000
The website provides two options “Read online” & “Read through HTML file”. As per the experience, using the HTML option will be best if you are going to read a book with illustrations.
Internet Archive
The Internet Archive was founded in 1996.
Internet Archive is a non-profit organization whose main objective is to digitize books, textbooks, research papers and provide it to people for free. It also curates images, videos, & audio files.
Internet Archive’s catalog includes well over 6,000,000 fully accessible titles. It has a search box where you can type in the name of the book (or book’s title). Searching is really easy. Once done searching, click on the book you want to read. While some books can be directly downloaded, for some you will have to sign up, only then you will be able to borrow a title for 14 days. At a time, a reader can loan a maximum of 5 books.
Another great thing about the Internet Archive is the text-to-speech function. It can be turned on by clicking on the speaker icon in the top right corner of the book viewer.
Open Library
Open Library is an Internet archive’s project only, it focuses on library books.
Open Library has 6 million authors and 20 million books.
Search the book title, when you find it, it will have either “Read” or “Borrow” icon.
Google Books
This consists of a big database of books scanned by Google and now are available for people to use for free. The Google Book’s home page consists of a search box. Readers can search using an author’s name or by typing in a book’s title. All books don’t have full previews, but one can always narrow down to find that. If you want a complete book, click on the “Full View” on the Search tools option; only these books can be read from the beginning to the end. Preview and full view allow the readers to read a free sample & full content respectively.
In the case of previews, the accessible content might not be from the beginning.
Smashwords
Smashword is loved by millions of people around the globe. It has books from independent authors and publishers; at present, there are more than 300,000 titles from over 100,000 authors.
The best thing about Smashwords is that it offers “free books”. If you are not able to locate the free books section on the website, just type in “free books Smashwords” in Google. Smashwords offer various formats in which you can download the free books (or the book you buy); most common formats are PDF, epub, Mobi, etc.
Blurb
Blurb is counted among one of the crucial self-publishing websites where you will be able to find really well-designed books. You can check out the titles in the bookstore section of the websites; titles from various categories are offered like fiction, art, biographies, poetry, and travel, etc. Preview for all the books is offered, but it is rare that you will find the full content of the book on the sample.
It has a beautiful user interface, really easy to use and the loading time of the preview is also very fast, you will not feel frustrated at all!
Scribd
Comics, presentations, brochures, and books, Scribd has it all. At one time it was totally free but not anymore. Now it works on a monthly subscription business model, however, it still offers a few book titles for free. Its reading interface is good which comes with the ‘download’ option.
You can also share what you are reading on Scribd; embed option allows the book to be shared on a website or a blog.
Wattpad
Wattpad is a Canada-based website & app that connects millions of readers online. As per the website, readers spend 2 billion minutes on the site every month. Books under a lot of categories like classics, general fiction, historical fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and fan-fiction are offered through this platform in over 20 languages. When you start using the app, you can select the language (or can change it later).
It has a great navigation bar where you would be able to browse by category, & if you want to find new stories, just click on “Discover”.
Bookish
To access books on Bookish.com, you will have to sign-up. Once you have created an account, the platform acts as a reader’s cloud bookshelf. All the books are not always available instantly, however, public domain titles can be browsed from a dashboard. It also allows readers to add their DRM-free ePub files to their cloud bookshelf.
Amazon Kindle
Just download the amazon kindle app on your mobile and write “free books” in the search box. Amazon offers a lot of free books on a daily basis that you can read on your kindle app. (You don’t need a Kindle device.)
You will have to share your debit card or credit card details, but no money will be charged for free books.
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