Following is a list of websites where you can read books online for free. These websites provide free books ranging on various topics including art, history, politics, psychology, business and technology. There are also fiction books such as romance novels, horror stories and science fiction novels. You can also read biographies, parenting tips, children’s books, and read about all types of topics such as traveling, religion, spirituality and even sports. Some of these books have pictures whereas others are pure text.
• Google Books:
Owned and operated by Google, the Google ebookstore has many books that you can read for free. Google’s ebook shop is very well organized and displayed with high-quality images of book covers and detailed descriptions about the plot, characters, chapters and content of the book. When you browse the online ebooks store you will see that most of the books will have a price under their title. However, you will also find many books that have “Free” written under them. You can select these free online books and read them without having to pay anything. You can read free books on ereaders, Android phones, iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch or on your computer as long as it is connected to the Internet. You may have to sign up for a Google account to gain full access to the benefits provided by Google Books.
• Onread:
Onread is a fun place to read online books because it provides an atmosphere that is similar to reading a real book. You can search through a huge database of free books, even the latest release and publications. After selecting the book that you want to read you will be taken to its book cover. You will see an arrow pointing right, and you can use this arrow to flip onto the next page. Using this method you can flip through all the pages and read the entire book. If you ever want to go back just use the arrow pointing towards the left and this will enable you to flip to the previous page. You can also enter a page number at the bottom of the screen to go to a specific page. This is very useful because you don’t have to start from the beginning when you need to continue reading the book from where you left off. You may also want to skip ahead to a specific page number after reading the contents section and realizing that you only want to read specific chapters. Sometimes the text on the pages has strange symbols displayed on it because it has not been scanned correctly into the system. Onread mentions that you can download free ebooks but this is difficult to do because you have to subscribe to certain services and after you download books you need to also download special book-reading software to read the books. However, Onread is still a great website to read books online for free because you can find so many titles.
• Yahoo Books:
Yahoo has free books available in its “Texts” section. These books are available to the public at no cost due to sponsorship from the Yahoo Open Content Alliance. These ebooks can be accessed without any limitations by anyone who wishes to read them. They can download books and read them on various devices that have text reader capabilities for reading .txt files. These are the same type of files that you will normally read in Notepad on a Windows computer. In fact, you could even copy text from books legally and paste it or publish it anywhere you like and Yahoo would not have any problem with that whatsoever.
Keep in mind that all of these websites like Onread may not be completely legal. They may also require you to sign up for subscription before you have complete access to the free books section. Usually you can read books online for free using your Internet browser, but sometimes you may have to download the free books first. Of course there are many other ways that you can read free books, like going to public libraries, but these are just some websites for reading books online for free that are useful for quick reference or leisure reading.
