In the USA, UK and EU, copyrights last for 70 years after an author's death. Once this period has passed, copyrighted materials enter the public domain. This means that every year, more and more books are legally made available to readers free of charge. They can be downloaded from numerous websites and enjoyed on e-readers, tablets and smartphones. Have a look at the selection of the best websites offering classic e-books for free.

Project Gutenberg

The Project Gutenberg website offers access to fifty thousand free e-books ready to be downloaded for your Kindle or tablet. You don’t need any special apps to read the e-books downloaded from Project Gutenberg. A standard web browser or your favorite e-book reader are enough. Everything available on the platform is provided for free, but you may consider making a donation to help the project digitize more books and further improve its offerings. 

FreeClassicEbooks.com

The website freeclassicebooks.com offers you thousands of e-books. You can read them online, download a PDF version, or get a PRC file for your e-book reader.

Planet Publish

Planet Publish has a great selection of free e-books. What is more, the website is nicely designed and gives you the option to download samples of books too, which can help you decide what book to read next.

DIY Genius

The online library of DIY Genius is dedicated to authors published before the 1950s whose ideas changed the world. They are all freely available in the public domain, so you can download them and enjoy reading them on any kind of portable reading device.

Digital Book Index

This resource gives you access to 165,000 free e-books from more than 1800 commercial and non-commercial publishers, universities and private entities. Among them, you’ll find about 12,000 classic books, ranging from medieval texts to contemporary literature. 

Loyal Books

Loyal Books (formerly Books Should Be Free) is yet another website offering you a vast catalogue of Kindle or ePUB books. What is more, it gives you access to audiobooks that can be downloaded in MP3 format or as iTunes Podcasts.

LibriVox

LibriVox is a peer-to-peer audiobook website where public domain books are narrated by volunteers from all over the world. You can either download an audiobook or narrate one yourself!