the personal journal of Brent Stewart
This isn’t much of a blog entry, but I’ve accumulated a set of good links for e-books and wanted to share this all in one place. I hope this is helpful!
When E-Books were new, the promise was made that they would drive down prices. Instead, prices have remained pegged to physical books, obviating one of the advantages of ebooks. It’s especially annoying that public domain books are commonly offered on places like Amazon at a premium. Here are some good places to find good quality public domain ebooks.
Project Gutenberg - Huge variety of books in a variety of formats. Standard Ebooks - Smaller library, but curated and lovingly produced copies of classics. Global Grey Books - Another small library of classics. Archive.Org - big variety, includes both public domain and current books that can be checked out. Handful of Leaves - links to Amazon copies of recommendations from Jordan Peterson. Faded Page - Public domain copies, some scanned in. Alice and Books - smaller curated collection. MPowered - another library of public domain books. Membership offered but not necessary for all books
Packt - high quality modern-ish programming books. There’s a whole set of “free forever” books, as well as a book of the month. Centless Ebooks - a mailing list of books that are currently free/low-cost on Kindle. Includes about 30 books, twice a week, generally either free copies of classics or low quality indies. Every now and then there are some real finds here though! Bookbub - another mailing list of free or low-cost ebooks. Covers more than just Kindle.
Calibre - the indispensible app for ebooks - a library and reader all in one. It’s a great application for organizing your collection with a ton of features. It’s very reliable and continues to improve. Apprentice Alf - tools for removing DRM from ebooks. Removing copyright protection and redistributing is illegal, but it is legal to create an accessible backup copy of something you already own. This tool allows you to purchase books wherever, store them in calibre, and read them wherever.