How to Read Free Books Legally

I’ve been an avid read since early childhood, and I’ve always been lucky enough to be gifted a lot of books from family members. But as I started to get older, I started to pay for my books and realised how expensive they can sometimes be. Especially when you’re on a tight budget – I often read more than one book a week which just doesn’t fit when you’re paying £7+ for each book. And that’s when I thought about free books.

So, I found out how to get free eBooks legally because I still wanted to support authors, but I couldn’t quite afford it. Especially when I became a student! So here’s how I managed to keep reading without breaking the bank.

Kindle

There are a lot of free books on Amazon for Kindle. There is always the risk that you’re going to get a bad book (there’s usually a reason why they are free!) but if you keep a look out, you can get some really good deals. For example, I’ve gotten Scythe by Neal Shusterman for free when it went on promotion! Which was great because it’s such a hyped YA book.

Plus, if you’re already using Amazon Prime – don’t forget you can use this to get free books! There’s the monthly First Reads exclusive where you can pick one of six new reads to ‘buy’ for nothing! There’s Prime Reading as well which lets you borrow up to 10 books at one time. Once you’ve finished you can ‘return’ the book and pick a new one from Amazon’s selection.

Online Libraries

Check out if your local library has paid for an online service. It should be visible on their website, and then you can borrow ebooks through an app on your phone or tablet. Normally you will need a library card to activate this though, and don’t forget you can also get free books physically at your local library!

Riveted

Every month Riveted by Simon Teen have a new selection of free reads. There’s both excerpts and full books available, and they’re normally new-ish reads! This is great if you read and love YA books. But you can’t send it to your kindle (that I can tell anyway!). So you would have to read it on your phone browser or laptop browser.

Tor

Tor usually have free book approximately once a month for a limited time! For SFF fans, this is a great way to get a good read for your Kindle or other reading device.

Project Gutenberg

If you’re into classics or into older reads then Project Gutenberg is for you! It holds thousands of books that are in the public domain such as classics which have expired copyrights. This is also meant to grow in 2019 because of multiple copyrights expiring!