Read Books Online With Our Top 16 Free Open Libraries

February 19, 2023 Chester 0 Comments

Top 16 Free Open Libraries To Read Books Online

Want to read books online? You’ve come to the right place. Here are the top 16 free open libraries where you can read books online.

Table of Contents

Authorama

Authorama is one of the best free open libraries to read books online because you won’t need a fast Internet connection. This website has a very simple layout and the content of each book is divided into small parts for quick loading purposes.

BookBoon

BookBoon is the perfect open library to read books online covering the following topics:

Business
Career & Study Advice
Economics
Education
Engineering
Finance
IT & programming,
Management
Marketing Strategies
Languages

This site has books written by experts from the top universities and there are over a thousand books to read or download.

BookBub

Looking for something new to read? This is where you’ll find the best and newest stuff!

BookBub is where you’ll find best-sellers and works by indie authors. This open library basically points you in the right direction towards books available on Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, and more. Titles are arranged by date, author, genre, and other helpful categories.

BookRix

A Free Open Library That Lets You Read Books Online From Self-Published Authors

BookRix is another free open library that lets you read books online from self-published authors and selections from the public domain. The most popular categories in this platform include fantasy, romance, thrillers, and young adult genres.

BookYards

There are thousands of ebooks and audiobooks within this free open library. To keep it running, BookYards depends on donations made by visitors, although registering to the site isn’t required. Making a small donation gives you more access to educational links, reference materials, and other documents.

One unique thing about BookYards is that you can share the content on other platforms.

FeedBooks

Feed your insatiable appetite for books with FeedBooks. There’s a huge collection of original and public domain books here covering everything from short stories, action and adventure books, history, and important school materials. If you’re a glutton for content, this is the site for you.

There’s no registration required to use this site and you can view books on your computer or on your mobile device. You can also download books in EPUB, MOBI, or PDF formats. If you’ve got a craving to read books online, check out FeedBooks.

Free-eBooks

“Read Anywhere. Anytime.”

They should have added “Anything” to that tagline. This site has fiction and non-fiction books as well as academic books. You can even find audiobooks here! Spend enough time digging around within the site and you’ll eventually find the thing you’re looking for.

If you want to read eBooks anywhere and you don’t have a reliable Internet connection, you can just download the ones you want to read. There’s a five eBook download limit per month in PDF format. Seems like a small number right? Well, if you read books online, that limit is basically non-existent.

Google Books

There’s a near-limitless well of information that Google provides. That applies to the books provided by Google Books. It works in the same manner as when you use the Search Engine. Just type in the name of the author or book and Google does the rest of the search for you.

You then get a preview of the book you’re interested in and Google Books will pull it up for you. Unfortunately, not all of the books are free on Google Books, but rest assured there’s a lot that can satisfy the needs of any bibliophile.

HathiTrust Library

Think of HathiTrust Library as a more user-friendly version of Google Books. There are millions of books and texts aggregated in this large-scale repository of information. You can read books online by checking the “Full-Text” or “Full View Only” option.

Once you find a book you like, just click on it and it’ll open up if it’s available for reading online.

This open library was made possible through the concerted efforts of individuals, organizations, educational institutions, and libraries. By doing this, they’ve made sure that future generations will have access to this rich collection for ages to come.

You can read books online for free without signing up but if you want to download some of the books, you will have to register.

Internet Archive

Founded in 1996, this non-profit organization offers free access to all types of digitized content. That includes everything ever uploaded to the internet from audio files, comics, eBooks, images, and videos. This is probably one of the most complete sites to visit if you want to read books online.

There are millions of books and texts here making sure you have enough content to last a lifetime! So if you’re looking for something, if it’s been uploaded to the internet, you can be sure it will find its way into the Internet Archive.

Library Of Congress

Well, at least we know where some of our tax dollars are going with this site. And it seems like this is one of the better-funded projects targeted at ensuring everyone gets a piece of the educational pie.

That’s really good. Here’s hoping this site never goes away.

You’ll find the world’s beloved children’s classics here as well as a multitude of other books that are great for educational and entertainment purposes.

Humpty Dumpty, Christian Andersen’s Classics, and Alice in Wonderland are essential reading for young children to make them love reading at an early age.

ManyBooks

How many is “too many?” Maybe 60,000 is a good number to start with.

That’s what ManyBooks offers.

Let’s say you devote an hour a day to reading an entire book and you’re looking at six years worth of enjoyment, give or take a year or two from that number, with ManyBooks. That number continues to grow at a regular rate so you might be looking at a few more years reading a book or two from this site.

What makes it even more enjoyable is how clean it looks despite the ads showing up at the bottom. The ads are there to keep this site entirely free, so don’t knock it off as a bad thing seeing as that’s how this site stays completely funded.

The books here can also be found in Project Gutenberg and most of them have a Creative Commons license. There are classic and contemporary works here with categories covering art, drama, history, health, music, science, and everything in between. You’ll never run out of books to read at ManyBooks.

Open Library

We did say this is a list of open libraries right? So, what better entry deserves to be here than one claiming the name, right?

Open Library is an offshoot of the Internet Archive. Its goal is to create one web page for every book ever published. Each page will also have all of its documented editions so you can take a look at the original form and the improved version at will.

That’s no small feat as there are over 3 million books in the Classics section alone. There are millions more covering subjects as diverse as arts, biographies, history, mystery, education, science, and more. You can read books online or download them for later. Book formats are in EPUB, MOBI, or PDF.

PDF Books World

PDFs are great formats for books on any device. That’s what PDF Books World offers.

Looking For PDFs? You Came To The Right Place

PDFs are light and you can store thousands of books into your device once you opt to download books stored in this site. The books featured here are from the public domain. This is an easy-to-usee site with categories including fiction, fiction, non-fiction, novels, academic and juvenile section

Unlike other open libraries, PDF Books World has dedicated servers to save their collection. That means you won’t have to jump around the net clicking on links when all you want to do is read books online.

SmashWords

This is an open library featuring the works of independent authors and publishers. It also stands as proof that literature isn’t dead. There are over half a million self-published works here giving you a lot of opportunities to read books online for free.

If you are dreaming of becoming an author, signing up for an account here and publishing your work is one good way to get noticed. It doesn’t matter what type of work you produce, fiction and non-fiction books are welcome here.

WattPad

One would say that WattPad is only fit for children and young adults. It’s not as serious as other open libraries due to its popularity with the younger generation. But, if it promotes reading to over 80 million readers and turns these young minds into writers as well, then I say this is an open library worth including in this list!

Bringing The Joy Of Reading To The Younger Generation

WattPad has made reading more accessible to the younger generation with its categories including urban myths, werewolves, LGBTQ+, new adult, young adult, and romance books. There are a lot of free books to enjoy once you register for an account.

In the end, you could say that Wattpad is the open library for this generation and hopefully for future generations as well!

And that’s our list! Have you found the one you liked?

Conclusion

Open libraries have been around for as long as eBooks have existed. What started out as small digital collections of masterpieces and classics eventually grew to a massive repository made available to millions of people around the world.

One would argue that an actual book is more precious than a digital one. The same could be said about open libraries and an actual brick and mortar building filled with books. But we now live in the digital age. Combining those two can only result in good things.

So whether you want to hold an actual book in your hand or read books online, the most important thing is that you will learn something. At the same time, you will be entertained by the work of a dedicated author who put in their time and effort to place all of those words into a narrative that has value for people of all ages.

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