How To Get E Books Free Or Cheap - without Piracy!

 Since I started reading in ebook, I have also used a number of options to get books cheap or free. I never, ever do it illegally. Piracy stinks! Anyone who tells me that it’s okay “because it gets you exposure” has obviously never spent long nights working on a book, meeting a deadline, doing research. 

But there are plenty of ways to get books easily without having to pay much, legally! There are review copies, of course, but for those you need to be willing to review, whether it’s on Goodreads or your own blog. Publishers are happy to send you stuff for this. Self published authors are often on social media, promoting their books and offering e-copies for review.

If you just want to read, consider starting with Project Gutenberg, www.gutenberg.org. That web site has gathered many thousands of books, novellas and even short stories presented in book form, that are out of copyright. You might be surprised what is out of copyright. Last time I looked, there were some early Agatha Christie books on Gutenberg - The Mysterious Affair At Styles, Poirot Investigates, The Murder On The Links, early Poirot titles, The Secret Adversary(the first Tommy and Tuppence book) and The Man In The Brown Suit. And that’s just Agatha Christie; there are early books or short stories by SF and fantasy authors of the Golden Age, including Robert E. Howard(Conan the Barbarian) Fritz Leiber and Poul Anderson. Mack Reynolds is there too, and H.Beam Piper. These re just examples from the top of my head. There are, of course, the nineteenth century classics, including all the obvious ones and the Lang Fairy Books. I’m careful of the ones in translation, because those were translated a long time ago, and I usually prefer more modern translations; I’ll happily buy those in Apple Books or Kindle.

In Apple Books, if you enjoy classic authors, there are the Megapacks for 99 cents each, which have a large number of the most famous short stories by your favourite authors. Many are themed: SF, Crime, Westerns, etc. Some are themed by author, eg the Fredric Brown Megapack, or the Mack Reynolds Megapack. They are very good value for money. 

BookBub, www.bookbub.com, is a web site that lets you know when various ebooks are on special. It’s not a pirate site. It just tells you what is going free or cheap somewhere and provides links. It has a newsletter, which saves you having to keep wandering back to the web site.

Prolific Works has its own app, though it’s also on line, at www.prolificworks.com. Again, not a pirate site. Authors put their own books up there for a certain time - for exposure, yes, but their own decisions. A few friends of mine have appeared there in the past.  In return, you usually agree to receive their newsletters. But those can be worth it too, because those newsletters sometimes offer freebies. They are generally self published books. 

It’s worth joining such social media sites as Twitter, where authors sometimes offer freebies, or advertise their books over 24 hours or whatever, for a low price or even free. It’s good manners to review those, of course, but if you don’t like the book the author would probably be happy for you not to review. On Goodreads, there are promotions and competitions when new books come out. 

There are other sites, which you can probably find with a Google.

Of course, all these assume you want to keep your ebook. Your local library will certainly have an ebook collection, which it lends you via BorrowBox or Libby or whatever your library uses. And they include audiobooks - I’ve borrowed an audiobook of The Hobbit from my library, via Libby. I’ll wish you good night and listen to Rob Inglis read “Riddles In The Dark.”