Tag: Free eBooks

Guardian 100 Best…Free eBooks!

Between September 2013 and August 2015, The Guardian ran their 100 Best English Language Novels of All Time series. As a large number of those books are available in the public domain (52%), I’ve created this page which reproduces their list containing just those titles that are available as free ebooks from epubBooks.com.

Even if you don’t agree completely with The Guardian’s selection, these are still some of the greatest novels published in the English language over the last 350 years. So dig in and enjoy. Continue reading “Guardian 100 Best…Free eBooks!”

The world’s first eBook?

Back in 2006 during my term as the Project Gutenberg newsletter editor, I spent some time performing simple statistical analysis on the PG catalog – trying to get clarification on their eText release milestones, among other things – when I stumbled across information about what was possibly the very first digital book to be created. At the time I thought it an interesting fact, but nothing more.

Skip forward nine years and while preparing this book for conversion to the epubBooks library I noticed this again, but this time the importance of the discovery could not be dismissed. Continue reading “The world’s first eBook?”

Book Series and Sequels enhancements

Over the last few weeks I’ve been working on improving the book series section of the epubBooks catalog. This includes making sure any current series contain all the books found on the site ,along with bolstering the incomplete entries by converting and adding any missing titles.

I spent some time updating epubBooks so that individual titles can now be added to multiple series, as it’s surprising how many books crossover from one series to the next, or have a sub-series – the Conan and Waverley series are two good examples of that.

New series added in the last week are; Continue reading “Book Series and Sequels enhancements”

Amazon Kindle Support

Over the last few years the focus of epubBooks has been to provide very high quality EPUB ebooks from many of the great classic authors such as Jane Austin, Charles Dickens, Author Conan Doyle and Beatrix Potter, and for all for free, but up until now we’ve not supported the Amazon Kindle.

In truth, I’d always hoped that Amazon would start supporting the EPUB format and allow their Kindle users to upload all our titles directly to their eReaders. Although there have been rumours, nothing ever came of them and I’m not honestly expecting that to change in the next few years. Therefore, we’ve decided to bite the bullet and start providing ebooks in both the EPUB and Kindle MOBI formats. Continue reading “Amazon Kindle Support”

New EPUB3 eBook Editions

A couple of months back I set to work on finishing the ground up rewrite of my PG eText to EPUB app and this week I reached a stage where I’m happy enough with the results to start releasing new editions of all the titles currently on epubBooks, along with starting to upload new ebooks.

The new pipeline I’m using (TXT > DocBook > EPUB) means that I can utilise the DocBook XSL project, and thus epubBooks now delivers all ebooks as EPUB3. The DocbookXSL stylesheets lack some of the more interesting EPUB3 features to allow them to be compatible with EPUB2 eReaders, which for the moment is good for everyone. Continue reading “New EPUB3 eBook Editions”

Amazon’s 100 Books: Just the Free eBooks

Recently Amazon released their own recommendation list of “100 books you must read before you die”. I must confess it is a somewhat lack-lustre collection, containing both the obvious entries, along with plenty of oddities. Amazon do claim that they’ve tried to cover all age groups and genres to give a balanced collection, that however hasn’t stopped plenty of people complaining about it, especially as there are no books older than two hundred years in the list, and only a handful of those we’re published more than one hundred years ago. It’s amusing how many people are complaining about this selection (any search engine will easily find them if you’re so inclined) but I think most are forgetting one thing about this reading list; the recommendations have been made by Amazon, a company who’s sole purpose is to make as much money as possible. Obviously they’re not going to include too many classics, they want you to go and buy these books from them, not pop off to sites like epubBooks and download them for free. Continue reading “Amazon’s 100 Books: Just the Free eBooks”

Tips on how to Get Free eBooks

With the recent changes to epubBooks I removed the option to search the popular ebook stores for free EPUB books – titles now found on epubBooks are still free, but are direct downloads only.

Lots of people are now wanting to know how to get free ebooks from those popular sites like Kobo, eBooks.com, Diesel-eBooks, etc. To help with that, I’ve now created a special page with tips on how to navigate those sites to find all their free ebooks.

So, head over to my epubBooks Free eBooks tips page … and happy searching!