Downloadable books

[mr friendly guy]

Besides Amazon's kindle, does anyone know of sites where we can download books for a fee (presumably cheaper than buying a paperback, plus no delivery charges) or even ones which are free (presumably such books are now in the public domain, although I am aware David weber puts some of his works for free).

As to why I don't buy more books, well there are some books I used to read which I enjoyed, but most probably not enough to buy them for my shelf, but enjoyable enough that I don't mind reading them on my computer.

I have discovered some sites where people upload various books notably http://www.scribd.com/ but I am hoping for others.

[Bounty]

Project Gutenberg would be an obvious first stop. It's all public domain, so few new releases, but if you're after the classics it's the place to go.

[Zixinus]

I heard about Mobipocket being decent. That might be worth a look.

[General Zod]

The only service I've used before for downloading books is DriveThruRPG, but it's largely for roleplaying games and related materials. So I don't know of how much interest it would be.

[SCRawl]

If you want to go with audiobooks instead of using your peepers the old fashioned way, there's always librivox.org. Load it onto an mp3 player, and listen while you ride the train, or drive to work, or wash dishes, or suture wounds, as applicable. Totally public domain.

[Broomstick]

I've been downloading from Project Gutenberg for years now, either to my desktop or my pocket PC Jornada which is still chugging along after a decade of use.

[FSTargetDrone]

Stanza is what I use on my iPhone and there are also desktop clientss for Windows and Apple. There are numerous free books to be found using the software.

[Stark]

I find most of the useful Stanza content is on [url=http://feedbooks.com/]Feedbooks[/s]. Sadly the Stanza interface is terrible and the search is actually worthless (turning up results that lack your term while ignoring items that are present and have the term). Hopefully the website is better.

[Atavarius]

As far as I know the main pay for ebooks sites are the aforementioned Kindle store and Mobipocket, eReader, and BN's ebook store. I haven't checked how all the prices compete, as I pretty much only use my Kindle now.

[Elessar]

Baen is my source for all sci-fi related e-books. It's got a huge archive, many of which are free, and then continuous near releases.

They even have a newsletter-like subscription option where you can purchase in advance, and get a number of new releases delivered monthly.

[mr friendly guy]

Thanks for the advice guys. I will sure be perusing these links at my leisure. Oh, and to Zod, the rpg links are useful since I am also into those products and have downloaded some from websites prior. I am not necessarily looking for more right now, but I am sure it will be useful in future.

[Solauren]

Any have links for good programming books?

I've been trying to find a copy of 'Game PRogramming Gems 5' but to no luck, via any avenue.

[Lord of the Abyss]

Some of the hardbound books of Baen's authors for some years now have included a free-to-copy CD with a collection of novels on them. Dahak's Orbit aka The5thImperium.com ( a David Weber fansite ) has a page with links you can view or download them at.