I just recently got myself the new B&N Nook Tablet. It’s a pretty nice little piece of tech, and I enjoy using it. So now I need to know where to get stuff to put on it! Anyone know any hidden little spots on the web to find interesting material?
I found free-ebooks.net and I’m trying to decide if I think it’s worth getting the paid membership to get epub format books instead of the free PDF or text versions, but other than that I only know about the big bookstore sites. So share your favorites!
And to be clear, I’m not only looking for free ebooks. Any good source, especially ones other than sites like bn.com that charge $11.95 for ebooks of 40-year-old paperbacks (for Dune, seriously?), is welcome.
The ones that get recommended most frequently around here, for good reason, are Project Gutenberg (the mother lode for older books that are in the public domain), manybooks.net (which has a lot of overlap with Gutenberg, but some more recent titles, too, and a different, possibly more user-friendly interface), and (if you like science fiction) the Baen Free Library.
And, I just had to look this up and see for myself. The electronic edition of Dune is currently priced at $14.99, at both bn.com (for Nook) and Amazon.com (for Kindle). Meanwhile, the paperback can be bought for $9.99 new or as low as $0.01 (plus S&H) used. And as if that weren’t bad enough, one of the customer reviews at Amazon says that “the Kindle version is very poorly edited, and formating and spelling errors occur regularly.” This is insane.
Many libraries lend ebooks. You should check if yours does, and what formats they support.