The 10 Best Free Ebook Download Sites (2024)

Ebooks are a great way to keep a large library of books on your phone, tablet, or computer. If you love to read and can never have too many books, ebooks are amazing—it's much easier to store ebooks than buy a whole new bookcase!

Better still, there are heaps of ways to download free ebooks, covering almost every genre, style, and author, and we've found ten of the best options.

1 Project Gutenberg

One of the best free ebook download sites is Project Gutenberg. It's a charity endeavor, sustained through volunteers and fundraisers, that aims to collect and provide as many high-quality ebooks as possible. Most of its library consists of public domain titles, but it has other stuff, too, if you're willing to look around.

As of this writing, Gutenberg has more than 70,000 free ebooks on offer. They are available for download in EPUB and MOBI formats (some are only available in one of the two) and can be read online in HTML format.

You can browse the library by category (of which there are hundreds), by most popular (which means total download count), by latest (which means the date of upload), or by random (which is a great way to find new material to read).

2 Google Play

Many people might not realize this, but Google Play has tons of free ebooks available to download. Finding free eBooks on Google Play differs slightly depending on whether you're using a desktop or smartphone.

• Desktop: Head to Google Play, select Books from the top menu, then scroll down. Under Top Charts, select Top Free.
• Android device: Open Google Play and select Books from the bottom menu. Then, select Top Free from the top menu.

You will be able to find thousands of free ebooks. The best part is you can check reviews and see if they're worth the read. The charts system also ranks the best free books, so you can spend your time reading something enjoyable.

While Google Play is native to Android devices, you can also install the app to read from your iPhone or iPad.

3 Open Library

Open Library is one of the best digital libraries where you can download ebooks for free—not just ones in the public domain but even recently released mainstream titles.

Open Library offers an easily searchable directory of all the free ebooks available on The Internet Archive. You might be surprised at the number of books available; at the time of writing, the total library is pushing toward 1.5 million items.

On the Open Library's homepage, you can readily find the books you might be interested in, thanks to the scrollable categories. Some of the most popular categories include Romance, Kids, and History. You can even find some textbooks lurking in the catalog.

The site is open source, and anyone can edit the information available for each book.

4 BookBub

BookBub is a service dedicated to making it easy to discover new authors. Because of this, BookBub has a large library of independent authors, all offering free ebooks. With BookBub, you can read reviews, check out the synopsis, and see if this is a book you truly want to read.

BookBub is best for those who've read all the classics and want some new and exciting reads.

5 International Children's Digital Library

If your child is a bookworm, you could spend a lot of cash on new titles. Unless that is, you find a reliable source of free ebooks for kids. The International Children's Digital Library is a godsend for anyone with young readers.

Books are available in a variety of lengths and reading difficulty levels. You can even search by criteria that might stimulate kids, such as the color of the cover. Each book is listed in a specific category for easy searching.

The International Children's Digital Library does appear small, but there are still great titles to be found. The ebooks here are also available in a variety of languages, with most of the titles in English.

6

7 Centsless Books

Unlike the other sites on this list, Centsless Books is a curator-aggregator of free Kindle books available on Amazon. Its mission is to make it easy for you to stay on top of all the free ebooks available from the online retailer.

Note that some of the "free" ebooks listed on Centsless Books are only free if you're part of Kindle Unlimited. Unfortunately, Kindle Unlimited might not be worth the money. However, if you have it, it could be a great addition.

Note: Since Centsless Books tracks free ebooks available on Amazon, there may be times when nothing is listed. If that happens, try again a few days later.

8 PDFBooksWorld

Between the three major ebook formats—EPUB, MOBI, and PDF—what if you prefer to read in the latter format? While EPUBs and MOBIs have basically taken over, reading PDF ebooks hasn't quite gone out of style yet. And for a good reason: PDFs offer universal support across platforms and devices.

If you want to stick to PDFs only, you'll want to check out PDFBooksWorld. While the collection is small, at only a few thousand titles, they're all free and guaranteed to be PDF-optimized. Most of them are literary classics, like The Great Gatsby, A Tale of Two Cities, Crime and Punishment, and so on.

You can also read these books online, making the platform great for citations or academic projects.

For other formatting issues, we've covered everything you need to convert ebooks for your Amazon Kindle.

9 ManyBooks

ManyBooks is a nifty little site that's been around for over a decade. Its purpose is to curate and provide a library of free and discounted fiction ebooks for people to download and enjoy.

Much of its collection was seeded by Project Gutenberg back in the mid-2000s. However, since then, it has taken on an identity of its own with the addition of thousands of self-published works made available at no charge.

Downloads are available in dozens of formats, including EPUB, MOBI, and PDF, and each story has a rating out of five stars, which is something Project Gutenberg doesn't have.

10 Free-Ebooks.net

As you can probably guess by its name, free-ebooks.net offers thousands of free ebooks. The content is broadly split into six categories: Fiction, Non-Fiction, Romance, Sci-Fi, Self Help, and Business.

To download free ebooks, you will need to sign up for an account, which is free to create. Once you have an account, you can download up to five free titles every month.

In addition to English, books are available in dozens of other languages.

11 Amazon Prime

We've snuck Amazon Prime onto the end of the list because, yes, it is a subscription service. However, Amazon Prime users can download thousands of ebooks for free through Amazon Prime Reading, along with all the other benefits a Prime subscription brings.

Amazon regularly swaps out the available ebooks and adds heaps of new options throughout the year. There is also the handy Discover tab for those moments when you're stuck for what to read and a push in the right direction.