There are several reasons for not reading. You may not like it, you may not have time, you may not be able to afford it, or you may not have space to store all those books. There’s no accounting for taste. But if your problem with reading more is your limited budget and the lack of space to store your books, we suggest downloading free books and ebooks to read on your tablet. And all of it legal, of course. They will take up virtual space, which is easier to manage than space in your home.
Thanks to ebooks, you can read every day without worrying about where to put the book when you finish it. What’s more, when it comes to prices, you have many options at your fingertips. From buying them on sale in official stores to getting a subscription service like the one offered by Kindle Unlimited or Nextory. And a third solution is to download free books and ebooks. Either by borrowing them or taking advantage of books in the public domain. That is, those whose copyright has expired because their authors died 80 years ago. That’s in Spain. In the United States, you have to wait 100 years.
Be that as it may, there are many platforms and websites where you can legally download free books and ebooks. We have selected the most representative, convenient and user-friendly. All of them offer a large number of books and ebooks in English, but also in Spanish, Catalan and Galician. So you can fill your tablet or ebook with books and read non-stop. And without breaking the bank.
eBiblio, one of the best places to download free books and ebooks (Spain)
Let’s start with eBiblio. This is the digital version of your traditional library. In other words, if you don’t have a library near you, or you simply prefer to borrow books without leaving home, this is the solution for you. To access its catalogue, all you need is a up-to-date library card and to download its official app for iOS (iPhone and iPad) or Android. It also has a web version for your browser. Please note that, depending on which region you live in, you will need to download a different app.
With eBiblio, you can download free books and ebooks for a limited time. Contemporary titles, classics, multilingual collections, comics, fiction and non-fiction… There’s something for everyone. You can also borrow magazines, newspapers, audiobooks and other digital resources. All from the app. It also allows you to create lists of books to read, rate them and leave reviews. An essential app for book lovers living in Spain.
Elejandría
Elejandría is one of the largest catalogues of books in the public domain in Spanish. It claims to have 1,936 books by 355 authors, and the list is growing. You will also find audiobooks. In general, finding titles is very easy and convenient. In addition, there is a section with themed collections.
You can download books and ebooks for free in ePub and PDF format. Once downloaded, you can open them on any device and with any app for reading ebooks. Furthermore, as these are public domain books, you don’t have to worry about copyright, as it has expired. This means that you will find classic books. If that doesn’t bother you, you will enjoy thousands of high-quality books from all eras.
ePubLibre
Similar to the previous project, ePubLibre contains books in the public domain and books freely shared by their authors. You will find classics from yesterday and today, as well as titles you may not be familiar with but will surprise you. It has more than 67,000 titles, most of them in Spanish, although there are also some in Catalan, English, Galician, Basque, French, German, and Italian.
You can browse its collections, catalogue, or search and filter to find what you are looking for. Downloads are via magnet links, which means you will need an application to download files via BitTorrent.
Project Gutenberg
When it comes to public domain book collections, Gutenberg or Project Gutenberg is possibly the first of these projects. Today, you can download more than 75,000 books and ebooks for free from this website. Most of them are in English, but it also has collections of books in Spanish, Catalan, and Galician.
One of its hallmarks is that it allows you to choose between several reading formats. You can read online via the website, or in formats such as ePub, Kindle, plain text, or HTML. This way, you will have no excuse not to download your book on any e-reader.
Open Library
The Internet Archive project is known for saving archiving web pages to preserve how they looked in the past, either because they have changed or because they have disappeared. It is a kind of library of websites. But it has other projects running in parallel. One of them is a book lending service. Although most of the books are in English, you will also find titles in Spanish and other languages.
The drawback is that it operates on a lending basis. So you will have to register for an account, which is free. Then you will be able to borrow any book that interests you. To read the books, you will need the Adobe Digital Editions application, which is used to manage copyrighted ebooks.
