2

By Paul Biba

image Here are two excellent resources for free e-books—Finding Free eBooks and eBooks Just Published. I check both of them every day. Both have RSS feeds, and I suggest you add them to your reader. I’ve mentioned both before, but volunteer work like this should be recognized every once in a while.

image Finding Free eBooks: “Are you looking for new books to read and new authors to discover? You’ve come to the right place!

“This blog will list Web sites legally distributing free ebooks, mostly novel-length fiction. Each site will have a blog entry so you can sign up for the rss feed and be notified of new additions.

“I want to support independent authors, I’m especially interested in linking to them. I will add individual author sites and multi-author sites (if they offer something different from the ones already listed) distributing free e-books legally. I will also add time limited promotional give-aways. Please send an email if you want to submit a site or an update.

“I am not very good at determining genres, so if you want to suggest some for particular authors, please do! And don’t strictly count on my genre labels, look around at all the authors listed.

“Also check out the limited time offers label. These are generally promotional offers from booksellers (but not always). Books with this label have no other labels so they won’t come up in any other label searches. They may or may not still be available when you are here.”

eBooks Just Published: “My name is Mark Gladding and I’m the founder of a small software startup, Tumbywood Software, based in Melbourne, Australia. Over the last couple of years I’ve become an enthusiastic reader of eBooks. During this time I’ve read many books from sites like Project Gutenburg and The Baen Free Library. I’ve also stumbled across gems from the likes of Cory Doctorow (Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town & Little Brother), Bob Walsh (MicroISV Sites that Sell), Stephane Grenier (How to Generate Traffic to Your Website), Seth Godin (Unleashing the Idea Virus), Zen Habits (Zen Habits Handbook) and Steve Jordan (As the Mirror Cracks) to name but a few.

“I’ve discovered there’s a lot of great eBooks being published all the time by independent authors. Unfortunately they’re not always that easy to find. Doing a search for ‘new eBooks‘ returns results for a few eBook sites, many of which don’t have new eBooks at all. Instead they are full of expensive, DRM-protected eBooks that are locked to your PC or mobile reader device. There are many reasons why DRM is a bad idea but personally I don’t like DRM because it prevents me from converting my eBooks to speech so I can listen to them on my iPod.

“I wanted an easy way to find out about new DRM-free eBooks as they’re released. So I created this site where authors can announce their eBooks and readers like myself can subscribe and keep up to date with all the latest eBook releases.”

 
2