Free E-books: Where to get them and How to read them | |
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:
The Internet Archive
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.
Happy Reading!!! I will put up a separate post for Linux Users (Ubuntu, not Mac OSX) soon. Michael Mak |