Everyone's Talking About E-Books

With all the hype surrounding the Amazon Kindle, the Barnes and Noble Nook, and the Sony e-Reader, it's obvious that e-books are here to stay. But what if you don't have the cash to drop on a reader or the books themselves?

What if we told you that you could read "Drawings and Studies by Michelangelo", "Essential Computer Skills for Working Women", "Little Women", "Dracula", and hundreds of thousands of other books for free, from your computer? Most of the websites below offer multiple formats, versions for mobile phones, and versions that are easier for Text to Speech software. You can even find some free audio books on these sites.

Here are some of the best we've found so far:

E-Books Directory -- "A daily growing list of freely downloadable ebooks, documents and lecture notes found all over the internet." Promote your own e-book, add comments to others, or just browse the directory. Some topics, like Children's Books, include audio books as well as standard e-books.

Online Books Page -- "Listing over 900,000 free books on the web." This site pulls together e-books from other websites to give you a single point to find titles. Includes prize winning books like Newbery Books and winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature or Pulitzer Prize in Letters; a section on books banned through the ages; and a celebration of women writers. Also includes a single point to find professional and academic journals with freely accessible archives online.

POWER Library's netLibrary allows you to read books both new and old on your computer screen. From the main POWER Library page, just click on the resource you want to use. Home users will need to type in your Pottsville library card number in order to use these databases.

Project Gutenberg -- 33,000 free books and counting from the first producer of free electronic books (e-books).

Read Easily -- This site provides books in formats where you can control the size of the text and color for those who need high-contrast pages, and the books are easily read by Text to Speech software for those who are blind or visually impaired.

For more sites that have free e-books, visit the Texas State Library and Archive Commission's Library Development blog post, "Free E-Books Are Here!" (Nov. 3, 2010)