Free legal downloads of books

Recently I read a post on Tumblr where someone listed links where you could download free books. Some of those books were modern or at least still copyrighted books. As far as I know copyrighted books aren’t available for free downloads.

Now I’m not familiar with the copyright laws in all countries throughout the world, but I do know that old books – in many cases, for instance in the USA, books published before 1923. In Scandinavia (Sweden) where I live, the copyright expires when the author has been dead for at least 70 years.

You can get modern books when the author chooses to allow people to download them for free. It might be the first book or some other older book, or the first book in a series. Many authors also allow free downloads of novellas and short stories, perhaps hoping to sell more of their full length work.

Another way to read ‘free’ books legally is to borrow e-books from the library (or for that matter, printed books too).

As far as I understand, it doesn’t matter if you’ve bought a title as a printed book. You still need to pay for the e-book if you want one. That is, unless it was a special deal where you buy a title as a printed book and an e-book.

Amazon is a very good source for free modern books. Some may have a sort of ‘message’ – I’ve read that sometimes authors try to promote their religion by writing free books. But like I described above, you can also get one book in a series or shorter fiction by a novel writer who is hoping to sell more novels. Don’t forget, if you live in the US and many other parts of the world you have to go to amazon.com, not for instance amazon.co.uk, unless of course you live in the UK.

The library is another great source for free books.

Here is a list of links to free (legal) download sites:

https://www.bookeenstore.com/fr/free
http://www.kobobooks.com/free_ebooks
http://manybooks.net/
http://www.baen.com/library/
http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/
http://www.freesfonline.de/Authors.html
http://runeberg.org/
http://litteraturbanken.se/#!start
http://www.fantasy-magazine.com/fiction/
http://www.sacred-texts.com/ring/two/
http://www.sacred-texts.com/ring/index.htm
http://www.readprint.com/
http://e-library.net/Fantasy.htm
http://www.getfreeebooks.com/?tag=fantasy
http://worldebookfair.org/
http://en.childrenslibrary.org/index.shtml
http://www.smashwords.com/
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=sr_st?bbn=1286228011&qid=1354222865&rh=n%3A133140011%2Cn%3A!133143011%2Cn%3A!251259011%2Cn%3A1286228011%2Cn%3A157028011&sort=price
http://bookboon.com/se
http://blakatt.com/index.php?option=com_docman&task=cat_view&gid=36&Itemid=53
http://www.bookyards.com/index.html

http://archiveofourown.org/
http://umrion.net/archives/

Many of these are in English, but you can also find books in Swedish, French and other languages. The last two are fan fiction sites.