#1 Project Gutenberg
This should be the first port of call for anyone looking for ebooks. Project Gutenberg has been going on for decades, and its founder invented eBooks in 1971. There’s currently over 16,000 books there, and a wide range of audio books too.
#2 Yummy
Forget your Backpack, Del.icio.us and other snazzy web apps. This is an absolute godsend of a web app. Yummy is a social book-bookmarking service with tagging and printing. That’s right. Download a book, then go back and get it printed if you like it. The thing that makes yummy special is the tagging, which makes a refreshing approach to searching through the archive.
#3 ManyBooks
Manybooks is a superb site with lots of material - over 11,000 ebooks available for download. It’s possible to download in a wide range of formats, including PDF, eReader, Plucker and iPod notes. This is one of my favourite sites for fiction ebooks. Don’t forget to check out the PSP section whilst you’re there.
#4 World eBook Library Consortia
The World Library has over 100,000 ebooks in PDF format on just about every subject you could imagine. It’s a great resource, well organised and also features a wide range of audio books in mp3 format. Sadly, most of the material comes from other resources and it’d be great to see more orginal content.
#5 Penn State Online Books
The Penn State University Online Books archive is the dmoz.org of ebooks. There’s a massive range of books available, and a great section on banned books.
#6 The Universal Library
The Universal library is another digital library service, this time from Carnegie Mellon University. With over 10,000 books, it’s well worth a visit.
#7 My-Ebooks
My Ebooks is an old site with lots of material in various formats, including palm-friendly formats and Microsoft book reader. Some of the material is out of date (especially the tech manuals section) but is still a worthy resource nonetheless.
#8 The Etext Center
The University of Virginia’s Etext center is host to over 2,000 ebooks available in Palm and Microsoft Reader format. This smaller archive seems to focus more on British and American literary classics, but has a higher signal to noise ratio than simple archiving sites.
#9 The Virtual Library
Founded by Tim-Berners-Lee of the WWW fame no less, the virtual library is a great resource for anyone looking for more modern subjects. It reminds me a little of Yahoo! from way back when.
#10 The Internet Public Library
The IPL is a 10 year old collection of over 20,000 free books, browsable by author, title or Dewey Decimal Classification. There’s reams of content here, but it’s well worth looking through if you haven’t already found what you’re looking for.
#13 www.oreilly.com
#14 www.readprint.com
#15 fictionbook.ru
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