It starts at midnight January 1st every years. Tens of thousands of books suddenly lose their copyright and effectively become free.
2019 marks the first time a large quantity of books published in 1923 have become legal to download for free now that ebooks are a thing. Including books by Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie, and Robert Frost.
As the years go by more books will be added to the public domain, giving readers a lot more options to read some fantastic ebooks for free.
So where can you download these free books, and older books which have also lost their copyright?
Well here is my alphabetical list of websites for free ebooks:
- https://archive.org/details/texts
- http://www.authorama.com/
- https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/ls?a=srchls;c=149827760;q1=*
- http://www.bartleby.com/
- https://www.bibliomania.ws/shop/bibliomania/index.html?id=32m2gmtX
- http://en.childrenslibrary.org/
- http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/
- https://www.free-ebooks.net/
- http://freecomputerbooks.com/
- http://www.freetechbooks.com/
- http://www.fullbooks.com/
- http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page
- http://manybooks.net/
- http://www.online-literature.com/author_index.php
- https://openlibrary.org/
- https://www.questia.com/library/free-books
- http://www.readprint.com/
- http://www.sacred-texts.com/
- https://www.slideshare.net/
- https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page
- https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Main_Page
- http://worldebookfair.com/
- http://worldlibrary.net/
Free Audiobooks!
- https://librivox.org/
Almost Free List - Not quite free, but inexpensive.
- http://worldpubliclibrary.org/
- https://www.scribd.com/
Note
It is also possible to get free ebooks via Amazon, including books that are not in the public domain. Some authors do promotions and allow their books to be free briefly (or they have countdown promotions where the book is cheaper temporarily). The trick to getting those is to follow the writer on Twitter or Facebook and look out for when they announce promo deals. It doesn't happen much with big name writers, but it is common for writers who do self-publishing to offer such deals.
Some authors will also write a series of books and then offer the first book for free.
For example British author V. Moody used to offer the first ebook of his popular series "How to Avoid Death on a Daily Basis" for free, but it is now $0.99 instead. So what happened was he offered the first book of the series for free for a long time, allowing the book series to become more popular. Then once his popularity was secured, he raised the price of the first book from free to 99 cents. The 2nd, 3rd and other books sell for $4.99 CDN.
So clearly there is some marketing strategy there.
Some authors also do web series, making money off of advertising instead of selling the book. So you read the book for free off their website, and the author still makes money off the advertising.
So there is plenty of options if you want to read good books and don't want to spend much.