In the spirit of saving money, I often chase “free” offers up and down the coastlines. My friends refer to this as “cheap,” but I like to think of it as “nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah, I got a free t-shirt and you didn’t!” Mostly, free stuff isn’t worth the battle, though. But sometimes, you find a gem.
WOWIO is my favorite free service. I originally signed up because they were running a scholarship sweepstakes, and free money on top of free ebooks sounded, really, really awesome.
I didn’t win the scholarship, but I did win a free t-shirt, and got more free ebooks than I’ve been able to read.
A lot of the books they started the service with are in the public domain, but they’ve been adding more and more books, including some sweet comic books. My favorite book that I’ve downloaded from them so far is “Hello,” Lied the Agent, and Other Bullshit You Hear as a Hollywood TV Writer
. (Amazon link, obviously you can get it for free from WOWIO.)
What’s the catch, you ask? A very small one – the ebooks have ads in them. Full-page magazine-style ads, about 6 per ebook. For long books, that about one every 100 pages. Also, you can only download up to 5 books per day. Yeah… PER DAY.
I could rave all day about how much I love the service, but you’re best off just going to their website and checking it out for yourself. In order to sign up, though, you’ll need either a “non-anonymous email address” (a university email works well), or a credit card number (they don’t charge it, they just verify your identity). This is to keep out riff-raff that would download the books just to redistribute them.
LOL. thats how I felt about Blingo. But eh now im bored with it lol.
1mil: I put Blingo in my Quick Search bar on Firefox, so I use it exactly how I used Google before – I barely even think about it.
For WOWIO, I was really gung ho about downloading books for about three weeks, and then I had more books than I can possibly read, so I don’t download many anymore, I just try and make my way though everything I’ve downloaded!
Hey, that’s a wonderful resource. I’m more interested in downloading and reading the ebooks and therefore prefer WOWIO over Blingo.
Hi ! Patric,sound’s like you can help me ? I have been trying to download free eBOOK’s for a week . I have an Aluratek ebook reader. I can down load a book to my computer but not to my Aluratek e-reader . An old sailor who sailed and lived 3 years on the USS Birmingham cl62 WW2.
Thanks for the resourse. Can’t beat a freeby!
Hi
I got to your site while I was searching for free books to see how this would relate to my new blog. I’m entirely focussed on how to find and enjoy legal free books. Wowio is only available in the USA busy still that’s better than nothing. If anyone wants to comment me on any more free legal book resources I’d be happy to blog about them. After all no one’s got enough money for all the books we’d like especially if we actually want to read them rather than look at them. Cheers
John Rocha
What a terrific resource. I will have to let my blog readers know about that one.
Robert Kennedy’s last blog post..Setting up a blog and forum
as a graphic novel and comic book publisher on wowio, i have to say it’s probably the best site in the past few years. especially for comics. it’s pretty much the youtube of comics and ebooks – and it’s perfectly legal. creators and publishers get royalty revenue per each download so unlike youtube, we actually earn a nice chunk of change while people get to download and read for free!
I have found some great books there but only bad thing is that I could only read them online or could download them by paying some money. Actually it is not a bad thing because each firm, organization and site need funds to survive. In context of free in price, it is good that we have them weather we can read then online or not.
Nice resource and there are many books on my son’s favorite topic(It is mine always) i.e science fiction. I think it is difficult to find all that stuff anywhere so easy. Thanks for sharing it.
I’m always looking for free eBooks so thanks for the list.
The ads in them do not bother me a bit as we all know people need to make money =].