
If you are honest, gentle reader, you probably have a rough list of books that you’ve been meaning to read for a long time. The kind of classic you pick up in a bookshop, the kind that makes you mull over how it would change your life until you remember that the latest Twilight/Dan Brown crossover novel has come out and skitter off to buy that instead.
But thanks to so many books passing into the public domain and the pioneering work of organizations like Project Gutenberg, more foundational works are available for free than ever before. And what’s more, the widespread use of e-readers like the iPhone, iPad, and Kindle mean that you can now read and store these books with ease and comfort.
Unfortunately, good, free books for e-readers are often tough to come by. The top free book list on Apple’s iBooks can be hit-and-miss; finding free books using the Kindle’s navigation is a laborious process, and again frequently includes more self-promoting teaser tomes from marketing gurus than it does books that you really want to read. Even if you have a specific classic in mind, the first search results are often ‘critical editions’ of the books which, while providing context and generally not costing as much as new releases, aren’t free. You clicked this link because it had ‘free’ in the title, right?
Read on...