Have you ever find yourself in a situation where you need (or want) to read a book, but it’s not available in your local bookstore, your local library, or you live in a place where you’re prone to shipping problems when shopping from online bookstores? Well, e-book stores already have very broad collections today. Even the local publishers in my country have started to publish their books in digital format. So most book availability problems may have been solved at this point.
But what if you simply don’t have enough allowance at the moment to buy a book? I have this problem so often that resourcefulness has become my well-established skill.
So I’m going to share a good news for those of you who probably haven’t found out about this by yourself. Here’s the good news, if you have an internet access and a computer or even just a smartphone, you probably can read that book you need or want to read. The legal way, of course. (I don’t recommend you to read pirated books though I have to admit: it’s easier.)
Here’s two ways that will probably help:
- If the book you want is old enough to be released in the public domain (meaning, its copyright has expired), it’s probably available for free in a digital format. And my go-to site for this kind of book is gutenberg.org. If you’re looking for classics, they’re likely available in this site. You can download them for free in plain text, PDF, or EPUB format.
- Did you know you can borrow e-books? I didn’t until two years ago. Try browsing openlibrary.org. Maybe the books you’re looking for are available there to borrow. After creating an account and borrowing e-books—two at a time, you can then read them online, or offline in PDF or EPUB format by installing Adobe Digital Editions in your computer or a DRM (Digital Right Management)-supporting reader in your smartphone. Here’s my tutorial on how to read your borrowed e-books offline.
So, there you go. Have fun browsing those two sites and may you find the books you’ve been looking to read!
فتي
Posted on July 25, 2016