Free e-Books Online

I've been considering a Kindle for some time now. However, I love books. Not just the words but the whole experience of holding a book. The smell. The feel. I've gone back and forth and, now, I am finally ready to make the jump.

Here at Homeschool Connections, we use a lot of classic books and most of them can be found for free download on the internet. I have take advantage of some of these free books but not much as I'd like as it isn't easy to read on my computer. Reading on a Kindle (and I imagine other book readers are similar) really is much like reading a regular book. You can even make annotations in the columns and highlight passages.

Of course, there is the public library and inter-library loan. However, there are times when even the classics are hard to get via inter-library loan (Our small town library didn't even offer inter-library loan until a few months ago!), a book is needed for an entire semester, or needed quickly.

With all those free books out there, the Kindle may very well pay for itself easily within a year. It has been advised to me to forget the Kindle and go for an i-Pad but that is out of many homeschool budgets including mine.

Following are several websites that offer free books online:

Baldwin Online Children's Literature Project
Bringing Yesterday's Classics to Today's Children. We're using this currently for our Ancient Greece and Rome courses, including Famous Men of Greece and Famous Men of Rome.

Christian Classics Ethereal Library
From Calvin College, though loaded with lots of Church Fathers and Catholic saints. It even has large selections from Summa Contra Gentiles. We've used this site for Chesterton and Tolkien titles.

Google Books
In addition to classics, authors have uploaded current books. Also offers magazines.

Gutenberg Project
THE original producer of free e-books. Over 100,000 books. We've used this one extensively.

Heritage History
Similar Baldwin Project, only dedicated exclusively to children's history books

Internet Archive

Librivox
Free audio books! We also used this one for Chesterton and other titles.

Literature Page
Classic books, plays, stories, poems, essays, and speeches, from the creators of The Quotations Page.

Many Books
All free books in a wide variety of genre. They contain books from Project Gutenberg, and has links to Librivox when available. You can download them already converted to a variety of formats if you don't want to go through Calibre.

Munseys
This site has titles you will not find anywhere else.

TextKit: Resources for Greek and Latin
Our Latin textbooks for this year are from this website.

As with any book, make sure anything you download is acceptable. Even classics contain trash.

I'll put these links up in the sidebar here at the blog so you find them there in the future.

Happy reading!!!