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Reading on the Cheap

A review of mobile book readers
Judy Dedmon Coyle
Friday, May 29th, 2009
kindle
The new Kindle is generating a lot of excitement. Those who have them sit on airplanes looking quite smug when I drag down the aisle burdened by the five books I have for any trip. Kindles are attractive, and if you don’t have one, you aren’t able to make books materialize at will. Or are you?

There are online sites with free books available for immediate download. This may not help much if you’re on an airplane with a three hour flight ahead. If you planned ahead, however, you could have downloaded several books onto your laptop, your iPod, or PDA. (Don’t tell them, but Kindle owners can download free books from these same sites.)

The websites are easy to use and informative. Books are arranged by author, subject, and language as well as categories. Most of the books are classics, but some are more recent publications in the public domain. Reprints of classics often come with nice covers and that cracked, shaky font. These freeware versions have readable fonts that can be enlarged for reading online or printing.

Authorama.com has all the books from the google.com free book search, lots of classics, including Shakespeare and a large collection of non-fiction. The site is continually updated with new freeware stories.

Readprint.com has poetry, science fiction, classics, and more Shakespeare. There’s an option that allows searching the books’ content. Books most recently added are in a special category for quick detection.

ManyBooks.net is a great resource. Hundreds of books are available, all free, all easy to find. And if your grandmother, who reads only Nahuatl or Frisian, is visiting, you can print out some books to keep her occupied. Books in French, German, Italian, and twenty or so other languages are also available.

Many other websites offer downloads for print and audio books: Librivox.org, the Literature Network at online-literature.com, and Learnoutloud.com, among them.
And the good news is…you can be well-read for free.

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