The iBookstore is great, but it’s certainly not the only source for reading material. Here are some of our favorite sites for grabbing e-books. To add them to iBooks, just drag the files into your iTunes library and sync your iPad.
Google Books features over a million public domain books in ePub format. But be warned: Google relies on Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to create their files, so errors are inevitable.
Google Books offers a variety of texts--gratis.
epubBooks.com features free ePubs from Project Gutenberg’s public domain titles. Developer Mike Cook has taken it upon himself to reformat the titles and make them available on his site free of charge. Contributors have spent a lot of time to assure great quality for their free e-books, many of which include black & white or even color illustrations.
Feedbooks.com also features public domain titles, but adds original works from new authors into the mix. There’s even a publishing service for distributing your own books to the masses. The site offers a wide variety of e-books in the ePub format in English, French, German, Spanish, and Russian. Feedbooks also offers a number of DC Comics, including characters like Batman and Aquaman.
Snee.com/epubkidsbooks offers a limited selection of public domain titles that have been tricked out with plenty of pictures for the young’uns. The Snee collection is aimed strictly at the tykes with popular titles such as Little Bo-Peep, The Three Bears, and The Sleeping Beauty--yours for the taking.
Grab free kids' books, courtesy of Snee.
Your library just might offer free e-books via the Overdrive service. A quick search of our local library turned up thousands of titles available for the taking, so once you’ve exhausted the other choices presented here, grab your library card and get downloading. Many libraries also feature e-books in Adobe PDF or other formats, which won’t work without conversion or a PDF reader like GoodReader ($0.99).
Project Gutenberg is the granddaddy of online e-book sources. The upside is that all the books are free--their copyright has expired, so they’re now in the public domain and available to anyone, for any use. The downside is that you’re stuck with the classics, written by authors who have long since left this mortal coil. But hey, they’re called classics for a reason!
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