LibGuides: Leisure Reading Collection: Free to Read Electronic Books

Start your reading journey with ebooks

The Leisure Reading Collection within the Kimberlin Library is a collection made up of physical books.

As an individual, you can buy electronic versions of some books, or you can subscribe to services that provide you with ebooks. But, did you know there is also a wide variety of books available electronically, which you can read for free?

Use the Library Search option on the DMU Library website to find a selection of available electronic books.

Broadening your search

Listed below are some collections that are available via the internet that might provide you with some leisure reading that we at DMU don't have in our physical collection in Kimberlin.

Take a look - you might be surprised!

Project Gutenberg

According to its website, "Project Gutenberg is a library of over 60,000 free ebooks". Ebooks contained in the collection are "works of literature and other works".

The quick search box appears on every page within the website, and you can use this to search for books by a specific author, or a specific title, or even just for a specific keyword.

If you click the Search and Browse tab, this will take you to a page called Booksearch, where you can select further searching options, like Advanced Search and Full Text Search, which when clicked reveal a drop down form or list. Alternatively, if you hover on the Search and Browse tab you can select from other search options. So, you can search the collection for a specific title, or you can browse the bookshelf, and select from some fairly general categories, or more specific ones.

Start your reading journey at Project Gutenberg.

Open Library

On its website, the Open Library reveals that is it part of the Internet Archive, and its aim is to provide a webpage for every book published. Many books published are still protected by copyright law which means they are not freely available, however, there are many books previously published which are now out of copyright and so available for you to read without a direct cost.

You can search Open Book using the subject terms they provide, or by searching for something specific in the general search box. You can specify if you are looking for a book title, or an author etc., by selecting from the drop-down arrow to the left of the generic search box. This also provides an Advanced Search option, which allows for a search using an ISBN, or a publisher.

Try starting your reading journey from the Open Library.

ManyBooks

A site called ManyBooks provides free access to lots of electronic books. According to its website, "ManyBooks was established in 2004 with the vision to provide an extensive library of books in digital format for free on the Internet."

You can search using the generic search box to find specific authors and / or titles, or you can dive into and browse a specific genre (including Biographies & History; Horror; Romance etc.) if you know you want to read a particular type of book, but are not prescriptive about the title or author.

Here's the page from which you can start your reading journey.