31 million free ebooks

Anne's Archive is an amazing resource with over 31 million free ebooks online. It is described as the largest truly open library in human history. All their code and data are completely open source, and the way the site is set up pretty much side steps all issues of copyright (they are only sharing download links rather than the books themselves).

The Library Genesis site is even bigger, and the downloads are faster, but it's more complex to use, and the domain names are constantly changing, so the simpler Anne's Archive is a better introduction to the world of eBook libraries for a lot of people. We will do a post about Library Genesis soon but in the meantime here are some current addresses for it:

 https://libgen.gs/

https://libgen.li/ 

 https://libgen.bz/

 https://libgen.la/

 https://libgen.st/

Anne's Archive has 31,603,758 books, and 99,900,496 papers in the database, all available to download. These include a huge range of health books and many WAPF specific titles.

We have been asked how the site works so here are some basic instructions showing how to download the ebooks:

First go to the Anna's Archive website and enter the author or title you are looking for in the search box - https://annas-archive.org/

The results of your search will rapidly appear - now if you want to filter by format tick PDF & EPUB in the file types on the left

After you select the book you want, click on one of the two "slow download" options - If you are new to the site you won't be a paid subscriber but these will still both work fine. Don't get carried away, you can only do about two downloads at a time from each one of the options.

 

There are daily limits on how many books you can download, I'm not sure what they are, (maybe 10?) because I'm not the only one downloading books on one internet connection. But when you do too many  downloads the site stops working. Leave it a a day and try again. Anne's Archive is certainly not the only site to find eBooks, just the easiest on to use. This website describes a bunch of other ebook download alternative sites

Next, remember to hit the "Download now" link to start the book downloading

Save your ebooks in a folder (don't change or rename this folder once you start using them on your ebook reader or your books will disappear from the reader & you will have to add them again) - I do edit the names of the new books before adding them to my ebook reader because the file names of ebooks downloaded through Annes Archive tend to be very long.

On my Windows PC I use Calibre ebook reader which can be downloaded here

I was trying to keep things simple for people new to eBooks and tested some other more basic eBook readers such as Ice Cream reader, but I prefer having all the features of Calibre (which is free anyway) - it's slightly more complex at first but it does everything I want.

For reading books on an Android tablet or phone I use the Read Era app which is really good. It's not set up for all the more complex text editing stuff that Calibre can do, but is great for displaying and reading your eBook collections. Although its not designed for PC use, it apparently can be installed on a windows PC - I'm about to try doing that and instructions for installing it on a Widows PC are here

 

Having access to 31 million eBooks is pretty amazing, and before you know it, you can have your own vast library.