The 6 best places to find free books online in 2021 (2024)

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Libby

Read for free on Libby

Borrow ebooks, audiobooks, and more from your local public library for free. You can download them for offline reading via the app.

All you need is a library card, which you can potentially sign up for in the app itself, depending on the library.

What to read:

Note: select your local library to see custom search results

• "Where the Crawdads Sing" by Delia Owens
• "Becoming" by Michelle Obama
• "Educated" by Tara Westover
• "Little Fires Everywhere" by Celeste Ng

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Project Gutenberg

Read for free on Project Gutenberg

Choose from reportedly more than 60,000 free ebooks, especially older classics for which US copyright has expired.

There's no fee or registration required, so you don't need an ID or library card to access these.

What to read:

• "Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austen
• "Frankenstein" by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
• "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" by Lewis Carroll
• "Moby Dick" by Herman Melville

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Overdrive

Read for free on Overdrive

Overdrive hosts millions of books and audiobooks online for free (and owns apps Libby and Sora). You can find everything from "The New York Times" bestsellers to children's books.

As with Libby and other library apps, you'll need a library card to access the books.

What to read:

• "The Four Winds" by Kristin Hannah
• "The Rose Code" by Kate Quinn
• "The Sanatorium" by Sarah Pearse
• "Klara and the Sun" by Kazuo Ishiguro
• "A Court of Silver Flames" by Sarah J. Maas

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Open Library

Read for free on Open Library

Open Library's eBook lending library gives you access to millions of books through the Internet Archive, an American digital library and preservation project that has been the subject of some controversy.

Unlike other sites, you'll be flipping through images of a book that's been digitized rather than downloading a PDF.

You can register with an email address, and you won't need an ID or library card to use it.

What to read:

• "The Four Agreements" by Don Miguel Ruiz
• "Snow Falling on Cedars" by David Guterson
• "The Lord of the Rings" by J.R.R. Tolkien
• "Pale Blue Dot" by Carl Sagan

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LibriVox

Listen for free on LibriVox

Listen to free public domain audiobooks read by volunteers from around the world. Audiobooks range from historical fiction to children's action and adventure.

LibriVox's collection is also included in the Internet Archive.

What to listen to:

• "Anna Karenina" by Leo Tolstoy
• "Wuthering Heights" by Emily Brontë
• "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain
• ​​"The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

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Digital Public Library

Read for free through the Digital Public Library

Download free ebooks within the public domain without creating an account.

You can search the Digital Public Library site by title, or scroll through collections that range from textbooks, children's books, young adult titles, language-specific books, works most recently added to the public domain, and editor picks.

What to read:

• "Monah Loves the Market" by Nathalie Aigil
• "Japanese Fairy Tales" by Yei Theodora Ozaki
• "Romeo and Juliet" by William Shakespeare
• "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius
• "Introductory Statistics" by Senior Contributing Authors

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While you'll find the best combination of title choices and helpful or unique features above, you can also find free books through Wikisource (a now inactive catalog of texts ranging from "The Art of War" to "Sherlock Holmes"), and some on Amazon through Kindle's free popular classics.