Free Books

Free E-books: Where to get them and How to read them

By Michael Mak, ELDER Project (www.elderproject.knet.ca)

With the evolution of portable e-book readers such as the Amazon Kindle or the IPad, or even the XO laptop, one might ask – are free books available on the internet? And what do we use to read them on a computer?

As I was compiling the OLPC Little Green Machines site (please check it out at: http://meeting.knet.ca/mp19/course/view.php?id=81 ) I came across a guide to use the XO as a eBook reader, so I decided to create a guide to share the info on how you can get free books and read them on a generic PC or a Mac.

1) Where to get Free E-Books?

For me, there are 2 main places to get books: Project Gutenberg and The Internet Archive

Project Gutenberg:

Project Gutenberg is the oldest source of free e-books and still one of the best. There are three main sites with different titles to choose from, including audio book format:

Project Gutenberg at http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

Project Gutenberg Australia at http://gutenberg.net.au/

Project Gutenberg Canada at http://www.gutenberg.ca/

The Internet Archive

The Internet Archive is a site devoted to preserving the public domain. In addition to books they have movies, music, and even some software that is in the public domain. There are over a million and a half e-books available from this site. The URL for e-books is:

http://www.archive.org/details/texts

Internet Archive books are created by scanning page images, including the covers of the books. When you read one of them the visual experience is very much like reading the original book. The website lets you read the book online in "flipbook" format, which is very much like paging through the original book:

There is a Children's Book Collection at the Internet Archive at this URL:

http://www.archive.org/details/iacl

Quite a few of the books are from the 1800's and more of interest to children's book collectors than actual children, but you can find the Oz books, books by Edgar Rice Burroughs ( Tarzan ), Jules Verne, Andrew Lang's Fairy Books , The Wind In The Willows , etc. all with illustrations.

2) How do you read them?

From both Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive, there are options to save it to a format called EPUB. (You can also save it to PDF, which is equally readable and accessible). For example, downloading Pride and Prejudice from Project Gutenberg will look like this:

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1342

Click EPUB (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1342.epub )

And save it to your desired directory, for example a flash disk for portability.

Now, it’s time to get the reader. Go to http://www.adobe.com/products/digitaleditions/#fp to download adobe software called adobe digital editions. For Windows users, you can download the EXE installation file here:http://www.softpedia.com/progDownload/Adobe-Digital-Editions-Download-76668.html

After the download is complete, you can use the reader to open EPUB (and PDF as well) to read your downloaded books. It has an extremely clean interface, where you can switch from library view to single book view. Please note to “open” the EPUB file, press ctrl + o to find the EPUB/PDF file that you are looking.

For Linux Users:

calibre is a free and open source e-book library management application developed by users of e-books for users of e-books. It has a cornucopia of features divided into the following main categories:

• Library Management

  calibre manages your e-book collection for you. It is designed around the concept of the logical book, i.e., a single entry in your library that may correspond to actual e-book files in several formats.

  calibre can sort the books in your library by: Title, Author, Date added, Date published, Size, Rating, Series, etc.

  In addition, it supports extra searchable metadata:

  • Tags: A flexible system for categorizing your collection however you like
  • Comments: A long form entry that you can use for book description, notes, reviews, etc.

  You can easily search your book collection for a particular book. calibre supports searching any and all of the fields mentioned above. You can construct advanced search queries by clicking the helpful "Advanced search" button to the left of the search bar.

  You can export arbitrary subsets of your collection to your hard disk arranged in a fully customizable folder structure.

  Finally, calibre will even go out onto the internet to find book metadata based on existing title/author or ISBN information. It can download various types of metadata and covers for your books, automatically. The metadata system is written using plugins so that different types of metadata sources can be supported in the future.

• E-book conversion

  calibre can convert from a huge number of formats to a huge number of formats. It supports all the major e-book formats. The full list of formats can be found here.

  The conversion engine has lots of powerful features. It can rescale all font sizes, ensuring the output e-book is readable no matter what font sizes the input document uses. It can automatically detect/create book structure, like chapters and Table of Contents. It can insert the book metadata into a "Book Jacket" at the start of the book.

• Syncing to e-book reader devices

  calibre has a modular device driver design that makes adding support for different e-reader devices easy. At the moment, it has support for a large number of devices, the complete list of which is here. Syncing supports updating metadata on the device from metadata in the library and creation of collections on the device based on the tags defined in the library. If a book has more than one format available, calibre automatically chooses the best format when uploading to the device. If none of the formats is suitable, calibre will automatically convert the e-book to a format suitable for the device before sending it.

• Downloading news from the web and converting it into e-book form

  calibre can automatically fetch news from websites or RSS feeds, format the news into a ebook and upload to a connected device. The ebooks include the full versions of the articles, not just the summaries. Examples of supported news sites include:

  • The New York Times
  • The Wall Street Journal
  • The Economist
  • Time
  • Newsweek
  • The Guardian
  • ESPN
  • and many, many more…

  calibre has over three hundred news sources and the news system is plugin based, allowing users to easily create and contribute new sources to calibre. As a result the collection of news sources keeps on growing!

  If you are interested in adding support for a news site, read the User Manual. Once you have successfully created a new recipe, you can share it with other users by posting it in the calibre forum or sending it to the calibre developers for inclusion in calibre.

• Comprehensive e-book viewer

  calibre has a built-in ebook viewer that can display all the major ebook formats. It has full support for Table of Contents, bookmarks, CSS, a reference mode, printing, searching, copying, customizing the rendering via a user style sheet, embedded fonts, etc.

• Content server for online access to your book collection

You can download Calibre for Linux here at: http://calibre-ebook.com/download_linux