Things to Do While Social Distancing: e-Books

Both children and their parents will enjoy this online collection of animated, talking picture books that teach kids the joys of reading in an exciting, new format they will love.

All you need to access eAudiobooks and eBooks is your Davenport Public Library card. We recommend downloading the OverDrive app for best performance.

RBdigital offers eAudiobooks and eMagazines. You will need to sign up for an RBdigital account before accessing digital materials through the program. We recommend using the app.

Get notified when new free books are available on Amazon.com.
Free Book List: see a sortable list of all free contemporary titles offered by Amazon.com.
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A news, reviews, and opinion blog about eBooks and eReaders.

Community forum with posts about eBooks, ereaders, eBook software, eBook formats, and more.

Free classics and out-of-copyright, pre-1923 books, as well as limited-time free promotional ebooks available for Kindle.

This simple to explore site lists completely free books from a variety of different authors. The site’s purpose is to bring public domain books from sites like Project Gutenberg into a form easily readable in a web browser.

Use on your Nook, Nook software or Barnes & Noble eReader software or app.

The site offers free Harvard Classics – complete volumes of the most comprehensive and well-researched anthology of all time (read-online, no downloads offered).

Over 1000 free e-textbooks for university students, books for business professionals and travel guides in PDF format. Main focus areas are Business/Economics, Engineering/Natural Sciences and IT.

The site offers thousands of free public domain books, like audiobooks or text files. Titles in 30 languages can be found here.

Chinese classics with each character hyperlinked to its definition and etymology.

Public domain books organized into collections. The complete works of William Shakespeare, Jules Verne, Charles Dickens or Mark Twain, among others.

Users can read an ebook in daily installments, delivered by mail or RSS feed. Apart from DailyLit’s own serialized fiction, you can find here hundreds of classic novels. Pride and Prejudice and War of the Worlds were two first books offered on platform’s launch in 2006. The site lists books in 14 categories, including short stories, horror, and coming of age.

DPLA is aimed at giving universal access to digital resources of American libraries and archives. Among contributing institutions, there are New York Public Library, University of Michigan, Harvard University, and the Library of Congress. The Bookshelf catalog includes over 1.6 million items. Perform a search, and from a book detail page, you’ll be redirected to a relevant website, where you can further read it online or download.

Created by the University of North Carolina. This site provides access to a large number of primary source documents relevant to the history of the Southeastern United States including Texas.

Europeana offers access to millions of digitized items from European museums, libraries, and archives. More than 2,000 European institutions across Europe contribute to the site, including the British Library and national libraries from many countries. To find free public domain books, search for the author or title, and in the left-side panel narrow results by file type (“text”), and by copyright (“public domain marked”).

This French ebook site is designed with mobile reading in mind. It’s tailored for mobile browsers, so you can download free ebooks directly to your tablet or smartphone. Feedbooks offers thousands of public domain ebooks in five languages. Unlike in Internet Archive, most of the free books have covers to look good on your e-reader or e-reading application.

Google launched its own ebookstore some time ago, but the earlier book scan project, Google Book Search, is still there. Perform any search and you’ll see a list of results. If you see a "Preview" or "Full View" link under the book’s title, it means you can read its scan in the browser.

A repository of works of classic writers and philosophers, from Sophocles to Epicurus, to Sun-Tzu. The books in digital format can be read here online as html files.

HathiTrust is a partnership of academic and research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world.

The website is a huge repository of text, audio and video files, including public domain titles. You can browse and read online over 5 million books and items from over 1,500 collections. The collections include the Library of Congress, American libraries, Canadian libraries, books from Project Gutenberg, and from the Million Books Project, as well as books for children. On Internet Archive you will find book files in over 180 languages.

The site makes free audio books from texts that entered the public domain in Europe.

Founded in 2005, LibriVox is an extensive library of free public domain audiobooks. Volunteers record chapters of public domain books. Afterwards, LibriVox releases the audio file for free in the public domain, and you may use it the way you like.

The site calls itself a “searchable online literature for the student, educator, or enthusiast.” Presently, there are more than 3,600 full books and over 4,400 short stories & poems from over 250 authors. The key to exploring the site is author index, from where you can browse linked books, quotes forum threads, and quizzes.

This is a popular catalog of public domain ebooks, sourced from Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive. The books are available in a vast number of different file formats, so if you are looking for less popular ones, like Plucker or FictionBook2, Manybooks is a good destination to explore. Currently, there are almost 30,000 titles in Manybooks.

NetGalley delivers secure, digital galleys to professional readers. If you are a reviewer, blogger, journalist, librarian, bookseller, educator, or in the media, you can use NetGalley for FREE to read and request titles before they are published.

The site, managed by the University of Pennsylvania, offers a clean interface to browse for more than 1 million free ebooks from around the web.

Open Culture is a popular blog that curates access to educational and cultural media. Among several collections, you can find here a directory of more than 500 free ebooks. Most of them are in public domain.

The site is a project of the Internet Archive and is intended to create “one web page for every book ever published." There are more than 1,000,000 free ebook titles available. Most of the titles are public domain, but you can also find here a growing lending library of over 200,000 contemporary ebooks. If the book is available in digital form, a "Read" button is shown next to its catalog listing.

A collection of popular works of classic literature, in pdf format.

Project Gutenberg is a top destination for free ebooks on the web. It’s a first ebook initiative in the world, established by Michael S. Hart in 1971. Over 44,000 publications were digitized by PG volunteers and are available for download (.mobi and .epub, among other formats) and to read online. What’s more, over 100,000 free ebooks are available through Project Gutenberg’s partners and affiliates. The site offers also a very convenient way to get complete works of selected authors in one file.

Public domain books in Finnish and Swedish.

Smashwords is the world's largest distributor of indie ebooks. We make it fast, free and easy for any author or publisher, anywhere in the world, to publish and distribute ebooks to the major retailers and thousands of libraries.

Almost 2,000 electronic editions of academic books managed by the Publishing Group at the California Digital Library.

The University of Pittsburgh Press and the University Library System (ULS) have formed a partnership to make books published by the Press available online.

Provides access to transcriptions of works by British women writers of the 19th century.

A well-managed collection of free public domain books in the Polish language. Currently, there are more than 2,300 titles available, either for online reading or to download (epub, mobi, pdf formats).

A collection of 19th century American fiction, as listed in Lyle Wright's bibliography American Fiction, 1851-1875. There are currently 2,887 volumes included.