Photo courtesy of flickr user Guillermo Esteves

With the growing popularity of eReaders, including Amazon's Kindle, Barnes and Noble's Nook, Sony's Reader, and Apple's iPad, to name a few, more and more of our members are looking for free sources of audiobooks and eBooks. If you're looking for the latest best-seller, these sites won't work for you, but if you're a student, researcher, or general reader looking for a classic piece of literature or, perhaps, a particular issue of Life Magazine from the year you were born, you're in luck. Enjoy!

•  AudioBooksForFree - Audiobooks only. Children's and classics. Filters available to narrow your search. Preloaded audiobooks, hard drives, CDs/DVDs available for purchase.
• Escholarship - Open-access scholarly publishing site from the University of California. Good for scholarly research. Downloads in pdf format.
• Google Books - Older issues of magazines, non-fiction (including health, self-help, and computers), and classics. Good for students. Log in to your Google account to create a personal bookshelf and to share your picks with friends.
• Internet Archive -Videos, music, books; classical literature. Includes a database of federal cases. Check out the WayBack Machine to explore archived web content.
• ManyBooks - Over 26,000 free ebooks, available for download in 25 different formats.
• Memoware - Eclectic mix. Good basic information on eBook formats.
• Online Books Page - University of Pennsylvania-sponsored site. Over 35,000 works in English. To be included, a work must meet 3 criteria: be legitimately available for free; be full-text; and be available in a stable, well-formatted standard format (html, pdf, plain text)
• Oxford Text Archive - Thousands of scholarly texts in over 25 languages.
• Project Gutenberg - E-books and audiobooks. Think classics--Austen, Dickens, Thackeray. Download entire CDs/DVDs. Digitized sheet music, too.
• Scribd -Social networking publishing site; original content.
• Wikibooks - free textbooks and cookbooks.

See you @ the Library!