How to Find Legal Free Ebooks

Legal free ebooks come from two places: public domain collections, where copyright has expired and anyone may distribute the text, and library lending services, where a publisher has licensed the book and your library card pays for it. For public domain books the main sources are Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks, the Internet Archive and Open Library, Wikisource and the digital collections of national libraries, with LibriVox for free audiobooks. For recent books the legal route is your public library through apps such as Libby and Hoopla. A site offering this year’s bestsellers as free downloads with no library login is not one of these, and the easiest way to stay on the right side of the line is to use the sources below and nothing else.

Public domain sources

Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.org) is the oldest digital library, started by Michael Hart in 1971, and the source of the catalog on this site. It holds over 70,000 ebooks, nearly all of them works whose US copyright has expired, each proofread by volunteers and offered in HTML, EPUB, Kindle and plain text. There is no registration, no app and no limit on downloads. Its weakness is presentation: files are produced by different volunteers over five decades, so formatting quality varies from book to book. Its strength is coverage. If a book was published in English before 1930 and anyone has ever cared about it, Gutenberg probably has it.

Gutenberg clears copyright under United States law only. Readers elsewhere should check the author’s death year against their national rule; Public Domain Books Explained walks through it.

Standard Ebooks

Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org) is a volunteer project that takes public domain texts, mostly from Project Gutenberg, and re-edits them to a single house style: consistent typography, corrected transcription errors, proper tables of contents, modern spelling where appropriate, and a plain cover drawn from public domain art. The results are released without any copyright claim on the editorial work. The collection is far smaller than Gutenberg’s, numbering in the low thousands, but if the book you want is there, its edition is usually the best-looking free EPUB available. The Great Gatsby on Gutenberg is itself a Standard Ebooks production.

Internet Archive and Open Library

The Internet Archive (archive.org) is a non-profit digital library that holds scanned books alongside web pages, audio and film. For public domain books it offers page scans as PDF, plus text and EPUB versions generated by optical character recognition, which are searchable but can contain errors. The scans are valuable when you want to see an original edition, its illustrations and typesetting, rather than a transcription.

Open Library (openlibrary.org) is the Archive’s book catalog. It lists one record per edition and links to free copies where they exist. It also runs a lending programme for in-copyright scans, which requires a free account and was reduced in scope after a court ruling in a case brought by publishers; for recent books, the library apps below are the dependable route.

LibriVox

LibriVox (librivox.org) is to audiobooks what Project Gutenberg is to text. Volunteers record public domain books, chapter by chapter, and release the recordings into the public domain. Quality varies with the reader, and many books exist in several versions, so it is worth sampling a chapter before committing to a long one. Most catalog titles on this site, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to Moby Dick, have at least one LibriVox recording.

Wikisource

Wikisource (wikisource.org, with a separate site for each language) is the Wikimedia Foundation’s library of source texts. Volunteers transcribe scanned editions page by page, with the scan shown beside the text so that errors can be checked, and the result can be downloaded as EPUB or PDF. It is strong on documents, speeches, historical texts and poetry, and on languages that Gutenberg covers thinly. For a short work such as A Modest Proposal or On Liberty, Wikisource and Gutenberg are equally good; for a non-English original, Wikisource is often the better first stop.

National and university libraries

Most national libraries have digitised part of their collections and made the public domain portion freely downloadable.

• The Library of Congress (loc.gov) offers digital collections including scanned books and manuscripts.
• Gallica (gallica.bnf.fr), from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, is the largest French-language collection, and is where to look for Voltaire, Jules Verne or Victor Hugo in the original.
• Europeana (europeana.eu) aggregates digitised material from European libraries, archives and museums into one search.
• HathiTrust (hathitrust.org) pools scans from US research libraries; full view is available for public domain items, and the site states the rights status of each volume.
• The British Library, the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek, the National Library of Australia’s Trove and many others run similar services.

These collections are best for scholarship and for editions in languages other than English. They are less convenient for casual reading because most offer scans rather than reflowable EPUBs.

Google Books

Google Books shows full text and a download option for books it judges to be public domain, generally older scans from partner libraries. It is useful for finding a book, and for reading an original edition, with the same caveats as other scans.

Free books that are still in copyright

Public library apps

Libby, made by OverDrive, and Hoopla are the two apps most public libraries in North America, and many elsewhere, use to lend ebooks and audiobooks. You sign in with a library card, borrow a title for a set period, and it disappears from your device when the loan ends. Publishers are paid through the library’s licences, so this is the legal way to read a current bestseller free of charge. Waiting lists for popular titles are the main drawback. Libraries in other countries use other platforms; your library’s website will say which.

Author and publisher giveaways

Some living authors release books under Creative Commons licences or give them away to build an audience, and publishers run limited free promotions through the main ebook stores. These are legal because the rights holder chose them. The test is simple: the download comes from the author’s own site, the publisher, or a recognised store, and the author is not surprised to find it there.

How to recognise a pirate site

Pirate sites are easy to spot once you know the signs, and the signs are consistent.

• Recent bestsellers offered free. No legal public domain source has this year’s novels. If a site offers a book that is still in bookshops as a free download without a library login, the copy is unauthorised.
• A “downloader” or “accelerator” you must install. Legal libraries let you download the file directly from the browser. A site that insists you install its own program, browser extension or app first is usually distributing adware or worse.
• Registration walls with payment details. Public domain sites do not need your card number. A “free trial” that asks for one is a subscription trap.
• Mismatched covers and scrambled metadata. Pirated files are often ripped from retail copies and carry the wrong cover, title or author; legal sources list the edition they transcribed.
• Endless redirects and pop-ups. Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks and the Internet Archive are plain, slow-changing sites with no advertising. A page that opens three new tabs on every click is monetising traffic from unauthorised copies.
• Take-down notices and domain churn. Sites that move to a new domain every few months are doing so because the old one was removed.

Besides the legal risk, the practical risk is the file itself. Pirated EPUBs and PDFs are a common vehicle for malware, and there is no editor checking that the text is complete.

How this site fits in

This site is a curated reading layer on top of Project Gutenberg. The books here are all in the Gutenberg catalog, and every download or “read online” link goes to the Gutenberg file, so the texts are the same ones described above and carry the same US public domain status. What this site adds is selection and context: book pages that explain what a work is and who it suits, author pages, genre shelves, and guides such as this one. If a book is not here, it may still be on Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks or one of the libraries above, and the comparison table below is meant to send you to the right one.

Comparison table

Source	What it holds	Formats	Account needed	Best for
Project Gutenberg	70,000+ public domain texts, mostly English	HTML, EPUB, Kindle, TXT	No	Coverage of pre-1930 English-language books
Standard Ebooks	A few thousand carefully edited public domain texts	EPUB, Kindle, Kobo	No	The best-formatted free edition of a classic
Internet Archive / Open Library	Millions of scanned books; lending for some in-copyright titles	PDF scans, OCR text and EPUB	No for public domain; yes for lending	Original editions, illustrations, rare books
LibriVox	Public domain audiobooks read by volunteers	MP3, M4B	No	Free audio
Wikisource	Transcribed source texts in many languages	Online, EPUB, PDF	No	Documents, poetry, non-English originals
National libraries (LoC, Gallica, Europeana, HathiTrust)	Digitised collections with public domain full view	Mostly PDF scans	Usually no	Research, original-language editions
Libby / Hoopla	Licensed current ebooks and audiobooks	In-app	Library card	Recent books, legally
This site	A curated selection from Gutenberg with reading guides	Links to Gutenberg’s HTML, EPUB, Kindle, TXT	No	Deciding what to read and why

For help choosing a file once you have found the book, see EPUB vs PDF vs TXT and, for Kindle owners, How to Read Free Ebooks on Kindle.

Frequently asked questions

Is downloading from Project Gutenberg legal outside the United States?

Project Gutenberg clears books under US law and asks readers elsewhere to check their own country’s rules. For most of its catalog there is no conflict: authors such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Plato are out of copyright everywhere. The question arises only for authors who died fewer than 70 years ago, and for translators and illustrators, whose death years are listed on the book pages here.

Why would I use Standard Ebooks when Gutenberg has the same book?

Formatting. Standard Ebooks fixes transcription errors, adds proper chapter navigation, normalises punctuation and provides a cover, so the file behaves like a bought ebook. Gutenberg’s edition of the same text is just as free and just as legal; it may simply look older on the screen. If both exist, try Standard Ebooks first.

Are free ebooks from library apps really free?

Free to you. The library pays the publisher for a licence to lend each title a limited number of times or for a limited period, which is why copies are limited and waiting lists exist. That arrangement is what makes borrowing legal, and it is also why a site offering the same recent book with no card and no wait is not.

Can I share the files I download?

Public domain files, yes: you may copy, email, print or re-host them. The only conditions are Project Gutenberg’s trademark terms, which apply if you distribute files commercially under the Gutenberg name, and the separate copyright on any modern editorial additions. Library loans and licensed free promotions are personal copies and should not be passed on.