A Master List of 800 Free Classic eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices

in Books, Education, Literature | October 5th, 2016 4 Comments

ebook-list

Maybe you’re an eBooks hold­out, a late adopter, a dis­dain­er of the book as a brand­ed “device”? I get it. Is there any­thing more ridicu­lous than putting down a book because its bat­ter­ies have run out? No amount of crow­ing about the suprema­cy of tech will make me love the smell and feel of paper less…

And yet…

With­in the charm­ing heft of print­ed books reside their lim­i­ta­tion. Trav­el­ing stu­dents, researchers, or avid read­ers must lug sev­er­al pounds of bound paper along with them on long jour­neys, or to work ses­sions at the local cof­fee shop. An eRead­er or smart­phone can hold an entire library—which one can expand ad infini­tum, it seems, on the fly.

This feature—along with the ease of copy­ing quotes and pas­sages and send­ing them across platforms—eventually sold me on the eBook as a robust sup­ple­ment to print. And if it sounds like I’m mak­ing a sales pitch, I am: for hun­dreds of free books, avail­able to read on the device of your choos­ing. Entry-lev­el Kin­dle, bud­get smart­phone, or lat­est, fan­ci­est iPad—most all will accom­mo­date the range of for­mats avail­able in our col­lec­tion of 800 Free eBooks.

Can you freely down­load the lat­est New York Times best­sellers? Not here, and I’d hope—for the sake of those hard-work­ing writers—that you’d pay to read new releas­es. Can you car­ry along with you on your next busi­ness trip or vaca­tion the works of Aris­to­tle and Freud, sev­er­al nov­els by Jane Austen and Joseph Con­rad, the mas­ter­works of Hegel, Hume, and Kant, the com­plete Shake­speare, and Proust’s mul­ti-vol­ume À la recherche du temps per­du? Quite eas­i­ly. Here’s a small sam­ple of what’s on our list:

See the full list of 800 offer­ings here. They may lack the sen­so­ry plea­sure of print, but the abil­i­ty to car­ry an entire library of clas­sic lit­er­a­ture in your pock­et has its advan­tages, to say the least. And if your trav­els include long dri­ves, you’ll also want to check out our mas­ter list of Free Audio Books.

Note: If you need help upload­ing .mobi files to your Kin­dle, you might find it use­ful to watch this video.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Audio Books: Fic­tion & Lit­er­a­ture 

A Mas­ter List of 1,200 Free Cours­es From Top Uni­ver­si­ties: 40,000 Hours of Audio/Video Lec­tures

Book Read­ers Live Longer Lives, Accord­ing to New Study from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness


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Comments (4)
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  • janice t villarreal says:
    October 5, 2016 at 10:58 am

    will this work on a Nook HD? don’t see it list­ed as being an option.

    Thanks

    Reply
  • Penny says:
    October 5, 2016 at 11:03 am

    Yes. Down­load the ePub ver­sion to your pc and trans­fer via USB.

    Reply
  • Nuwan says:
    October 6, 2016 at 5:07 pm

    there is an excel­lent curat­ed col­lec­tion of clas­sics from The Uni­ver­si­ty of Ade­laide in Aus­tralia.

    They have most of the clas­sic lit­er­a­ture in the pub­lic domain. The best part is all the books are beau­ti­ful­ly for­mat­ted for read­ing on devices, some­thing that is not guar­an­teed on most oth­er sources of e‑books.

    Reply
  • Ebook says:
    October 11, 2018 at 10:51 pm

    Thanks for shar­ing this use­ful infor­ma­tion. I hope more such posts will come in the­fu­ture.

    Reply

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