Find Free Books on the Internet

If it is sources of free books you want, you need go no further than FreeBookSearch.net, which probably has search tools for the most documents(electronic books) online. The tools on that page are mostly search engines and they are aimed at book sites as well as the entire internet, so you may get books that are not exactly out of their copyright. It is up to you to make sure that the books you download are legal copies in your jurisdiction.

From this one site, you can not only search for hidden caches of books that you can download for free, but they have links and search interfaces to all of the world's digital libraries and online collections making it a one-stop place to find anything you need.

FreeBookSearch.net also has a separate search for audiobooks (and/or "Books On Tape"). Their audiobook search also happens to find mp3 and music files by sheer accident.

Copyrights

US Copyright law is more restrictive than the copyright law of Australia, at least according to WhereToCopyright.com, so if you wanted to find some newer legal books which have been published online that are a bit fresher than the ones where the US copyright has expired, you might want to look at some Australian websites for e-books. Copyrights expire there sooner than elsewhere.

Copyrights Expire Faster in Other Countries

You can find a non-USA online source of free books at the DigitalBookIndex.org. - I am not a copyright lawyer and am uncertain as to how downloading something legal in Australia might impact you if you live in the USA, so please do not download anything that might not be legal in the USA if that is where you are located. I'm not at all sure how all that works and cannot advise you to break the law.

Now if you are like me, you HATE reading books on your computer screen. I have purchased a high capacity printer that can bang out a book, printed on both sides of each page in a few minutes, so all I need to do is set my printer to print a book, and then bind it. I then have my own copy of the book to leave laying around the house until I finish reading it... no need to turn on my laptop and glare at my screen.

Book Hunters' Secret Weapon

I have used this secret weapon on a few occasions, as I live overseas and there have been times when one of my children needs a book for a school assignment. I have two young boys, and so they frequently wait for the last possible moment to tell me they need a book - URGENTLY. Luckily I have this secret weapon, and I use it ethically - that is, even if I find a book that the author has not released to the public domain, after I use the version I found online, I go to the bookstore and buy that book or at least one other by the author if the original title is not available in my country of residence. I feel that if they create something I find valuable, they should most certainly be paid for it in some way.

I had to do that to get my hands on "Freakonomics" by Stephen P. Leavitt. It's a brilliant book and I could not wait to read it. I got a copy online, and then when it became available where I live overseas - many months later - I bought a real copy for my wife and son. Later, I got a free copy from the brilliant Mr. Leavitt himself at a conference we both attended... I never told him the story, but did not think he would mind as I did the right thing and made certain he was rewarded financially for his brilliant work.

So what is my secret weapon... it's a Boolean Script I wrote that just rips books right out of the internet.

A boolean script is a script that you can insert into a search engine to give you very narrow sets of results. I have written one to find books for when my kids come to me in a panic with some assignment... on a Sunday night... and they need a book in English. We do not live in an English speaking country, so this is a HUGE problem.

Here are my scripts:

This one finds entire directories of books. You can enter the name of an author or title along with this boolean string.

-inurl:(htm|html|php|shtml|asp|jsp|pls|txt|aspx|jspx) intitle:index.of "last modified" description size (pdf|doc|rtf|txt)

This one will find just books all over:

filetype:(pdf|doc|rtf|txt)

Other Search Options for Free Books

Google Book Search is a very good source and they also have tons of books online.

Another source is The University of Ghent (Belgium); which has its "Meercat Search" of over 138,000 books online and they are busily scanning a total of 300,000 books which should all be online shortly. http://search.ugent.be/e-books

Last but not least, there is an entire list of Digital Library projects, you can find here.

Another way to find Audiobooks

If you cannot find the audiobook you want with FreeBookSearch.net, you can try "Musgle". It is designed to find MP3 and music files, however it can also be used to find audiobooks.

Good luck in your hunting, and if you do find something which has been improperly posted on the web, do the ethical thing and pay the author in some way so that it makes it so you only borrowed the book. Buy another book by the author - better yet, buy the SAME book by them, send them a check... something.