Gutenburg Project

There are fifty thousand free eBooks ready to roll for Kindle and iPad reading, courtesy of the Gutenburg Project. Get inspiration from their daily top 100 chart – a few examples being: Pride and Prejudice, Beowulf, Alice in Wonderland, the Count of Monte Cristo and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. But there's everything you can think of and more, check it out! Instant download with or without images, in Kindle or ePUB. Mind-blowing resource.

Loyal Books

Loyal Books is one of the prettier websites in the field, offering a vast catalogue of Kindle or ePUB books – and also audiobooks, downloadable as MP3 or iTunes Podcasts. Everything from Aesop's Fables to Jules Verne.

Digital Book Index

The Digital Book Index gives you access to 144,000 free eBooks (alongside a few you have to pay for) – in terms of literature, there's about 12,000 to choose from, running from William Shakespeare to the Harlem Renaissance. A gorgeous resource for lit-heads!

Upenn.edu

At Upenn.edu you'll find over two million free ebooks (two million!!!!) curated by the University of Pennsylvania Library, and downloadable from various other US universities in PDF form. You can read them online as eBooks.

Read Easily

Read Easily is an ace resource with hundreds of titles that you can customise ebooks, in terms of colour scheme and text size, then download. It's mostly intended for the visually impaired, so if you have a friend or relative who's eyes aren't what they once were, please help them out with this top, top resource. Otherwise, it's a great little selection for anyone who loves lit.

Great Books and Classics

Great Books and Classics isn't the best of these sites but, notable for being organised in 10 year periods, so if you are looking to delve into a particular era for inspiration, this could be the place to do it.

Planet Publish

A comparatively short, but thoroughly excellent selection at Planet Publish. A lovely, clean easy-to-navigate blog site with samples and downloadable PDFs. The easiest of all these sites to get a taster of the author's style before you download. Might be a good idea to explore here before downloading an unknown author.

Librivox

Librivox is a brilliant peer-to-peer audiobook site where public domain books are read by the people, for the people.

Find more great reading recommendations on our Books and Reading page