Ahira's Hangar

I thought we could share links here to free ebook libraries available for downloads to your home computer.

Note, I am talking completely legal free books here, not illegally pirated materials. Please do not provide links to pirate/illegal sites!

Baen Books has quite an extensive free library . There are some pretty good books there, too! Many of them are the first books in series (which makes sense - that way they can suck you in and get you to pay money for the rest. ).

If you do not see anything you like at Baen, check back in a month or two, as they regularly add titles to the free library.

(Menolly might want to make special note that some of the books by Mercedes Lackey are fantasy novels that center around music and/or musicians. And since they are free and have no strings attached, hurts no one and nothing to try them. )

You can sign up for a weekly link to a free book to download from Tor .

They have been offering some great stuff, like Scalzi's Old Man's War and Buckell's Crystal Rain.

And then, for older materials (especially classic novels from previous centuries) there is .

as an example, look at all of the free books they have for one of the founders of the fantasy genre,

or one of the founders of science fiction,

Our public library is part of . I have not used it yet, but it looks really cool...

has a good collection, too. They have some stuff that I haven't found on gutenberg, like Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft.

wow, awesome links. Now if only I didn't hate reading oof my computer screen.

--A

Well, I'm not a big Star Wars fan myself, but you can get one of the books for free (also the audiobook!):

Haha, thanks man. I downloaded that immediately. Can't say no to Star Wars books.

--A

There's not much free Fritz Leiber available, but manybooks.net just posted up a full-length novel a few weeks ago called "Night of the Long Knives." Here's a to his free stuff. I sort of started reading it on the side yesterday, and it seems pretty cool. I think it's a post-apocolyptical sci-fi.

I've checked out a lot of these links. I receive the Tor free book of the week or month via email. I've been considering buying an ebook reader. Does anyone have any experience with them? Are they worth it? I'm not a huge fan of reading long stories on a computer and I'm not sure a reader is for me.

I have heard that the new kind, with screens that look like paper, are really easy to read from and use. The one I have heard the most good things about is the one from Sony. A lot of people have told me to avoid Amazon's Kindle, as it only takes a special format of dedicated files. I will probably get one (a reader) someday - but not until either the price comes dramatically down or the kids are both done with college.

Now, that sounds promising. One of the things I would be interested in would be a backlight so I can read at night in bed without bothering my husband. He works days and I work afternoons, so this has been an issue.

Yeah, with the Kindle, you have to use Kindle files you purchase from Amazon. From what I understand, you cannot put free downloaded books from the internet on it. And I do not think they give you any freebies, whereas supposedly the Sony device has a free library of some 500 classic novels available.

One thing I would use it for would be vacations. I could take just one small device and a charger with me, rather than dithering about and ending up packing a bunch of books.

It's a god-send for vacations and trips. I'm travelling to scotland on business in a month, and I don't want to lug around a couple of big books (nevermind, it can get uncomfortable reading a regular book for hours on end in a dark plane). I bought the Lyonesse trilogy from ereader when they were having a global 20% off sale a month or so ago; I got the whole thing for 15 bucks. Not bad, eh? I figure I'll get maybe half-way through the second one on the trip. Hell, maybe I read all three, or it may turn out that I hate the books. I'll still have plenty of back-ups to suit my mood.

Pocket PC's are pretty nice because you can load pretty much any old software on them. There's tons of free applications out there for windows mobile devices. I don't know how it works for things like i-phones. I personally think that if you're considering dumping 400 bucks on a kindle or something similar (I think the sony's are more reasonably priced), you should test one out from a friend to make sure you like it, cuz if you get one and don't like it, you're stuck with a piece of wall-art. At least with a pda, you've got something you can use for other stuff. I really think the smaller size is a boon, too. I don't really get why they designed the kindle to be the size and shape of a book. I'd rather have something portable and convenient myself. Hell, someday, I may get all crazy and get a pair of for reading. How crazy would that be?