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If you want old books, Project Gutenberg [gutenberg.org] might be worth your time.

Ditto, Feedbooks is another good source for the same, but often much better formatted ePubs. (They also have non-free publications, but at a reasonable price).

If you have a Kindle device, I guess you might have to convert the files, in which case my suggestion would be to use Calibre (which handles just about anything, and which I use exclusively to manage content on my Sony reader), but there are plenty of other options available.

Feedbooks.com is a great place. Lots of freebies, and their freebies tend to be formatted better than the same public domain books on Amazon and Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg is great - but they do skimp on some formatting and features. Also the Google Play Store has lots of freebies also - usually, but not always with the best formatting around. I have a Kindle, and unlike many of the public domain books from Amazon the Google Play Books are usually DRM free so I have no problem converting them to a Kindle compatible format using Calibre.

I've even taken to fixing some ebooks with crappy formatting on my own and converting online reference material to useful formats using Sigil.

I started out adding to you comment, I probably should have top leveled.

I used feedbooks with my eInk device. They have all of the Project Gutenberg collection, as well as a load of CC works, and a nice typesetting engine for generating PDFs for your device (or ePub or other formats). For technical books, Safari Books Online carries all of the major publishers and lets you access chapters via a subscription, or download entire books in PDF or ePUB. If you just want to buy them, InformIT carries all of Pearson's books (Prentice Hall, Addison-Wesley, and so on), and they usually charge less for DRM-free ePUB + PDF than Amazon charges for a DRM'd Kindle book. Oh, and on my last book Amazon managed to fuck up the formatting of the Kindle version (the version on InformIT was fine)...

Harry Harrison wrote quite a bit of stuff during the days when copyright actually could expire.

http://www.feedbooks.com/books/search?query=harry+harrison

Noteworthy: "The Misplaced Battleship" (the first Stainless Steel Rat story) Deathworld (the first Deathworld novel)

It would be cool to see the Stainless Steel Rat adventures turned into movies. I'd love to see what a .75 calibre recoilless pistol would look like as a prop.

steveha

Going back further, Olaf Stapledon. Truly cosmic sweep, and influential in his day.

Seconded. Star Maker is amazing, and doesn't really feel aged. Download them free of charge in various formats here :)

Randall Garrett is now best remembered for his Lord Darcy stories (which are great; if you haven't read them, check them out). But one of the best things he ever wrote was a novel called Unwise Child.

There are action scenes, there are geeky science-fiction ideas, there is a bit of sleuthing. The main character is "Mike the Angel", a genius who designs spaceship engines and likes to build gadgets. There's a robot named "Snookums" who... knows too much about hydrogen. There is an overall logic to the plot that isn't obvious as you are reading but makes sense when you reach the end. There is a love interest, a lady scientist who is every bit as brilliant as Mike but in a completely different field. And there is a bunch of lovely writing and snappy dialog, as smart people banter with each other. I think I have re-read this novel over a dozen times, and I'm not done with it yet.

And lucky you, it is one of the works that is actually in the public domain. (It was written when the author had to renew a copyright after a fixed term to keep the copyright, and Garrett never renewed it.) So go and grab your copy here:

http://www.feedbooks.com/book/1957/unwise-child

You might also find a paperback edition published under the name Starship Death. Since the book was public domain, there was nothing stopping anyone from publishing it under a different title, and someone did.

P.S. If you haven't read the Lord Darcy stories, you can get them in ebook form (any format you like, and with no DRM) from Baen. The stories are collected in a single omnibus volume simply called Lord Darcy and it includes every story Garrett wrote. They are detective stories, set in an alternate-history Earth where magic was developed instead of the science we have; much of Europe and all of North and South America are united into the "Anglo-French Empire" and the rival superpower, the Polish Empire, is often causing trouble. The best stories work both as detective stories and as a glimpse into another world. You can read the first two stories as a preview; if your tastes are anything like mine, you will want to buy the book after you read these.

http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200207/0743435486.htm

steveha

I guess I should mention Little Brother by Cory Doctorow.

It describes a very similar scenario. Has a happy ending, though. :-)

Maelstrom by Peter Watts The evolution of a viral soup on the net is illustrated beautifully in this (freely available) book: http://www.feedbooks.com/book/975/maelstrom It's a great read. Viruses fighting for supremacy and interbreeding on the net may be an inevitable part of an evolving net-biosphere but probably not the best thing to encourage!

I'm partial to science fiction and some fantasy. My favorite books are mostly "hard" SF, where the tech stuff is believable or at least self-consistent.

Luckily, a whole lot of the stuff I like is available as ebooks. Baen sells many of my favorite authors, and some of the stuff I like is public domain.

I'll give a very strong recommendation to Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy mystery stories. These are actually hard SF stories, despite featuring sorcerers casting spells; the spells follow certain rules, and the solution to a mystery is never something stupid like "an evil sorcerer cast the 'locked room mystery' spell". Randall Garrett had figured out many details of an alternate history for Earth; the stories were always set in the year he wrote them, but in a world of low technology and advanced magic. Every Lord Darcy story ever written is available in a single volume, and you can get it as a Baen ebook or as a paper book at your choice. Mostly it is short stories, but there is a novel called Too Many Magicians which I have re-read at least a dozen times, perhaps 20 times or more. You can get the flavor from the first Lord Darcy story, which has lapsed into the public domain and you can find it here: The Eyes Have It

I'll also give a very strong recommendation to the whole Vorkosigan series by Lois McMaster Bujold. Some of the novels in the series won the Hugo or the Nebula, so I'm not the only one. She very convincingly sells the idea that Miles Vorkosigan is a genius; some books just tell you "So-and-so is a genius" but the character doesn't ever do anything smart. Not here! (My theory is that Bujold is really smart, and spends a lot of time thinking about how Miles should do things; and the "genius" part is that Miles comes up with his solutions quickly.) If you tackle this, I recommend you start with the book Shards of Honor and then read the series in chronological order (not the order in which they were written). Miles is born at the end of the second book; the first two are more about his mother Cordelia.

If you want to go really old-school you could read the classic Lensmen series by E. E. "Doc" Smith. These books really set the bar for space opera; in the first books you might only see a few dozen ships fighting a battle, but by the end of the series the battles become truly epic. My favorite part was where they turned the Solar System into an epic-sized vacuum tube to focus energy from the Sun to fry invading space fleets; this weapon was called "The Sunbeam". The heroes are heroic, the bad guys are despicable, and you will never wonder which is which in this series; look elsewhere for philosophical ruminations on the shades of grey between good and evil.

I will also give a strong recommendation to certain stories by Keith Laumer featuring a protagonist named Jame Retief. Unfortunately, toward the end of his life Laumer wrote some really bad Retief stories, or took good ones and padded them out to novel length (with bad new material). So, I can't just recommend any Retief story. The ones written in the 60's are pretty much all good. Baen has a collection simply called Retief! and every story in that one is good; it includes my all-time favorite story, "Cultural Exchange". Retief is a very competent man, with a very junior rank in the Corps Diplomatique Terrestine (the diplomatic corps of Terra, or the CDT). Pretty much every senior person in the CDT is incompetent, and Retief scurries about behind the scenes salvaging situations that the ambassadors were screwing up. Laumer in his early years was a master of lean, fast-moving prose; he packed a lot of action into a few short pages, and he crammed a whole lot of ideas into some of his stories. The entire Retief! book is offered for free on the Baen "Free Library" page; check it out! (This link is from Google; I can't seem to access baen.com right now, so perhaps their server is down for some reason? If this link

Amazon and feedbooks

There are many places to download e books for free: Free e Books,

Scribd , Feedbooks , Smashword and many more if you just Google free e books. I've got more thn 400 books in my Kindle, about 25% of which I've had to pay for. Quitchabitchen.

You don't need to be anti e-reader. Just anti DRM. There's plenty of free material out there if you know where to look for it. I'm pretty sure there's others too.

Cheers!

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/the-best-6-sites-to-get-free-ebooks/
which has links for several others, including:

http://www.manybooks.net/
http://www.feedbooks.com/
http://www.booksinmyphone.com/

http://manybooks.net/ and http://feedbooks.com/ are also excellent sources of free ebooks, providing published, unpublished and public domain titles.

FWIW, personally I abhor ads and would seek to locate an ad-free copy of a given book before purchasing an ad-embedded copy.

you consider e-books are running $5-$15 each

All of the eBooks that I've read have been free. There are a huge number of public domain and creative commons books out there. The best modern one I've read so far is Ventus, but when you consider that a lot of early science fiction, as well as pretty much all classic literature, is now in the public domain there's no shortage of things you can read for free. If I'd bought the Penguin Classics versions of all of the books that I've read on my eBook reader, I'd have spent more than I spent on the device. Plus I've also used it to read a large number of academic papers and a few classic textbooks like the original Smalltalk 80 book and the BeFS book.

The kindle was designed for book junkies, and for people who like to read newspapers/periodicals. Does it have limitations, yes, but it does do its key functions well, deliver text content anywhere there is a cell signal with a very long battery life.

There are several key markets for books.

Premium customers - new books in hardback
technical customers - technical books.
children books
paperback customers
bargain hunters
periodicals -

The kindle is aimed at the premium, paperback, periodical, and bargain hunters.

Amazon has realized that only their premium customers will even pay for the 9.99 price for new books. If I pay that kind of price for a book, I want the dead tree trophied on my book shelf with the thousands of other dead trees in my house, so I can re read them later in life.

Personally I use my kindle for disposable media, like news papers ( the oklahoman and St. Louis Post dispatch) and magazines ( reason, mit tech review and reader digest.) All those combined equals a little over $20 a month, that before the kindle, I never would subscribe to.

When I am in the mood I usualy do the following to get free and cheap books, usually classics.

1. Every day or so amazon will offer a free book on the kindle, to lure you into a series ( it works, i usually end up buying the free book and the others in paper form)

2. type "-domain" in the kindle search bar. It will return all of the current free and cheap books. Usually around 20,000 or so.

3. Go to http://www.feedbooks.com/kindleguide with the browser on the kindle. That will download a "book" that will allow you access to most of the guttenberg and other free book repositories on the intertubes.

Due to the ease of free content, amazon has been posting low cost collections of authors for usually a $1.00 that has excellent indexing and tables of contents.

I think the ipad will have its market but until they can make a device that I only have to charge once a week is useable any time during that period to allow me to read ( usually 2-3 hours a day) in addition to all of it computer usage, I will stick with my netbook and kindle in my backpack.


dhh

Not to be overlooked here on /., OMNI's very title was early 733t-speek (it's a launch countdown, if you don't get it).

First place I read Gibson and lots of others, plus those glossy ads for Compuserve eventually led me to ring up a year's allowance in gaming fees in the first month over the 300-baud modem on my Color Computer.

We've come a long way with both technology and sci-fi. As much as I loved reading Clark and Gibson, these days I'm blown away by the likes of Charlie Stross ( Accelerando ) and Peter Watts ( Blindsight ).

Not to be overlooked here on /., OMNI's very title was early 733t-speek (it's a launch countdown, if you don't get it).

First place I read Gibson and lots of others, plus those glossy ads for Compuserve eventually led me to ring up a year's allowance in gaming fees in the first month over the 300-baud modem on my Color Computer.

We've come a long way with both technology and sci-fi. As much as I loved reading Clark and Gibson, these days I'm blown away by the likes of Charlie Stross ( Accelerando ) and Peter Watts ( Blindsight ).

Except that the free pdf link [samlaget.no] does not resolve...

It's CC licenced, and thus available at Feedbooks in several formats: http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2466. Enjoy, it's an interesting read :)

While the market is still burgeoning, content providers arenâ(TM)t going to back any e-book format that doesnâ(TM)t protect their copyright, so at least for now, digital rights management (DRM) is a fact of life.

Okay then, move along, nothing to see here. Safari Books Online lets me download technical books in DRM-free PDF format. Feedbooks lets me download public domain and creative commons fiction in DRM-free PDF format (I've just finished reading Ventus, which I'd thoroughly recommend). Why on earth would I buy DRM'd eBooks?

Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm are freely available from Project Gutenburg and from FeedBooks.

FeedBooks even has them nicely formatted for the Kindle and a very convenient catalog useable from the Kindle to download them at will. For more information, see: http://www.feedbooks.com/help/kindle

All of the above is true. I picked one up (the Kindle 2) last Saturday. I love the thing and grabbed the handful of Amazon books that are $0.00 (some OK sci-fi ones.) But of more use were the freebies - ManyBooks, FeedBooks, and MobiPocket. A lot of the "classics" are there - the ones you always say you're going to read but never do. I've got a ton of them that I now have in a convenient storage medium (for me to still never actually read ;))

All of that said, I'm pissed that I just got the 2 and now the DX is announced so soon after. I'm a Mac fanboy so I'm used to that kind of thing happening, but ... The only reason I would consider returning the 2 and holding on the DX would be the native PDF support. I'm guessing that's a purely software-based feature (as well as the horizontal/vertical flipping) and hopefully it'll be an optional software upgrade down the line. Or if those things are important to me, should I send the 2 back, fork out the additional $100 and wait for the summer release?

Myth:

If you buy a Kindle, you are locked into Amazon's Kindle store.

Truth:

There are many sources for books that can be read on the Kindle.

Some Free Sites (Public Domain / Creative Commons)

MobileRead.com (look for .mobi books you can download to your computer or download the MobiGuide and get your books via Whispernet) Feedbooks.com (books can be downloaded to your computer or if you download their Kindle Guide you can get your books via Whispernet - they even have a video on how to use the guide) Manybooks.net (when you download to your computer, look for Kindle format or Mobipocket) 1001Books (download books to your computer or directly from your Kindle browser)

Some Pay Sites

Fictionwise.com (look for .mobi books but NOT Secure Mobipocket books) BooksonBoard.com (register your Kindle's PID and you can download any .mobi from their Overdrive servers - to learn more about this see the Visual Kindle Guide wiki) Baen.com (great site for Sci-Fi books which offers free as well as low cost books)

So your Kindle is still somewhat useful. I would hope that more competition arises and Amazon removes its Kindle services from its e-book services so as to avoid a nasty inevitable anti-trust suit.

That enough formats for you?

Oddly enough... no. Missing is the non-proprietary cross-device standard, epub.

For me, LRF is a suitable substitue, but it would be nice to encourage the adoption of superior and non-vendor-specific formats where they're available.

Ah yes, I've read a couple of his stories (Printcrime, Anda's Game), they are quite good. Thanks for reminding me :)
It seems like a lot of his works are on feedbooks as well, I'll check it out.
BTW, I'm not affiliated with feedbooks or anything, just very impressed :)
I recommend it to anyone with a digital reader.

Yeah, see the problem with bigotry isn't the lone bigot, it is the culture out there that facilitates bigotry in the first place. I paraphrase; as I remember it, Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil said that altruism is a disease of the ego and that those who would be allowed to feign altruistic motives to serve their own ends are the ultimate abominations a society can create. All this talk of protecting the "sanctity of marriage" when they typically have the highest divorce rates, is laughable. Don't even get me started comparing conservative heterosexual christian household's sexual abuse rates with those raised in any type of homosexual household. One significant problem with theists as I see it is they believe too much in divine explanations for things that at some point they lose the ability to see the effect of their wills on themselves and others. They are malformed individuals with god complexes who rightfully should be shamed in public for their views that harm others through the veneration of ignorance and the catastrophes that such confused ideology causes. Inexcusably they were allowed to prop up GWB and get him elected without a major news outlet questioning the sanity and judgment of a man who claims to speak to a divine being. Anyone who claims such nonsense is mentally ill.

So, put some pebbles in your shoes and you'll escape recognition. The world seems to be heading towards the one described in Corey Doctorow's Little Brother novel. - which is available under a creative commons license. Nicely formatted at feedbooks.com.

So, put some pebbles in your shoes and you'll escape recognition. The world seems to be heading towards the one described in Corey Doctorow's Little Brother novel. - which is available under a creative commons license. Nicely formatted at feedbooks.com.