The world is full of places to find new books and audiobooks: libraries, bookstores, garage sales, online, and on a friend’s bookshelf. But if you’re looking to save money and find books for very little money, or even for free, check out the links below.
Table of Contents
1. Find Free books & audiobooks online
- Annasarchive & Singlelogin & PdfDrive – free ebooks
- MobileRead – This page lists places where you can borrow modern and classic eBooks, audiobooks, and other digital content free of charge, or for a periodic fee.
- Best Sites to Read Books Online Without Download or Registration List of over 300+ websites that offer free books and do not require a download or registration.
- 200+ free book websites: 176 Links to Read for Adults & Kids.
- JustFreeBooks searches the content of more than 700 websites that offer books without charge.
- Enter in Google Search (book title.pdf). For example, type fourhourworkweek.pdf, and you can find the pdf book in a Google search.
- Free ebooks Find 1,000 new authors in several different categories, including non-fiction and fiction, each month.
- Ereaderiq is a better way to find Kindle ebook deals.
- Openstax.org has peer-reviewed, openly licensed textbooks, with several free digital textbook versions available.
- Open Library: Contains lists of print and in-print books that you can pick up at the library or bookstore, scan, or type up in the text.
- WorldCat– is the world’s largest online catalog that organizes over 15,000+ libraries from over 107 countries.
- Paperbackswap – lets you trade your used books and choose from over 5 million available hardbacks, and audiobooks to read.
- Littlefreelibrary– The world’s largest book-sharing movement!
- Bookshare accessible online library for people with print disabilities.
- Ethicalbooksearch – Helping you buy books from responsible book sellers around the world
Audiobooks
- 224 Places for Free Audio Books Online lists over 224 sites that allow you to legally listen to free audiobooks.
- Golden Audiobooks has a great selection of audiobooks for free.
- Libby or Overdrive (built by the makers of Overdrive): You can borrow ebooks and audiobooks from your local library instantly and for free, using just the device in your hand.
2. Favorite reading tools
- Listenbox provides a simple way to listen to YouTube videos in the background using any podcast app. Listen to your blog or articles using the best voices in a podcast app.
- Getmatter – Matter pulls everything you want to read into one beautiful place. With powerful tools, curation, seamless audio and more, we’re building a reader for today’s internet.
- Smallpdf is the Swiss army knife of PDF editing tools.
- Goodreads is a site for readers and book recommendations. Its mission is to help people find and share books they love. Using this site, you can track the books you’re reading and find more from the ones you love. It currently has over 85 million registered users. Also you can analyze your Goodreads data with Readstats.
- JiffyReader – world’s first bionic reading chrome extension.
- GoodReads-ratings-for-ama See Goodreads ratings directly on Amazon.
- Calibre-eBook stores all your books in one place in its ebook software.
- Audiobook Speed Calculator: audiobook length based on reading listening speed.
- Get past website paywalls and read for free 12ft.
- DIY Book Scanner: Create a book scanner and digitize your old books to save space.
- 1 Dollar Scan: Affordable Book Scanning.
- Bookfeed: use their tool by specifying a list of authors, and it will generate an RSS feed with each author’s most recently released book.
2. Use online library tools.
- Library Elf Save money by tracking your library’s books and loans.
- Wowbrary Get free weekly email alerts about your library’s newest books, movies, and music.
- Library extension Lets you instantly see book and e-book availability from your local library.
- LibraryThing is a community of over 2 million book lovers and features a library-quality catalog.
3. Check out what others are saying by reading book reviews.
- Reedsy sortable list on over 240 book review blogs.
- Bookmarks.reviews aggregates book reviews from various book reviewers and assigns an individual rating (Rave, Positive, Mixed, or Pan). These ratings are then averaged into a result, and the book becomes part of our Book Marks database. If you’re not into book ratings, see Readerly to see how much your book taste overlaps with a book reviewer.
- Read Twice: This site pulls recommendations from public figures, authors, celebrities, and other high-profile individuals who have shared their favorite books on social media or in interviews. It then sorts the books into categories such as business, history, self-help, fiction, and more, making it simple to find books in genres that interest you.
- Autorkeynotes – Authors explaining books core ideas.
4. Make sure you are getting the best price
- Isbndb is the world’s largest book database, with over 29+ million books from hundreds of libraries and publishers around the world.
- Bookfinder is a book price comparison search engine that scans over 100,000 booksellers around the world.
- Addall is a book price comparison search engine that searches through over 100,000+ booksellers, bookstores, and millions of books.
- Bookfinder4u is a book price comparison search engine that searches through over 130 bookstores.
- Biblio Online sells over 100 million used and rare books from booksellers around the globe.
- Find more books: – A book search engine that scans through over 250 million books and over 60,000 antiquarian stores and used and new booksellers
- Book sale finder provides a list of places that offer book sales around the United States.
- Bookshop buy books online while also supporting local bookstores.
- Libro Buy audiobooks from your local bookstore.
- Chirpbooks Find top-selling audiobooks for up to 95% off.
5. Save time & money by reading summaries
Free book summaries
- Fourminutebooks: read over 1,000 book summaries to learn the three main ideas in 4 minutes or less.
- Samuel Thomas Davies
- Actionable Books
- James Clear
- Njlifehacks
- Derek Sivers
- Allen Cheung
6. Use the Library services
- Reserve new-release books and movies before the library can even get them in.
- If the library does not have any items in stock that you are after, you can use an interlibrary loan. An interlibrary loan is when you ask another library far, far away to lend a thing to your library branch so that your branch can then lend it to you.
- If there is a library within your library’s radius that has the item you are looking for, you can ask the library to order it for you. All you have to do is fill out a request. They will buy the book and lend it to you.
Other services that libraries help with
- Resume writing and job hunting
- Free legal consultations for common legal problems
- Filing your taxes
- Credit repair services
- First-time home-buying classes
Things you can get at the library other than books are
- Music
- Movies and TV shows
- Audiobooks, which can be found on a Libby
- Magazines and newspapers (See DiscountNewspaper.com to save money on newspapers.)
- Academic journals
- Technical manuals
- Members-only websites (like Consumer Reports)
- Textbooks
- Comic books and graphic novels
- Sheet music
Other ways to save money on books
- Consider buying a used or refurbished Kindle device to save money on future purchases.
- Avoid new releases – Put the books on hold at the library.
- Use airplane mode on your e-reader to indefinitely extend library e-book checkouts. Reddit post
These resources should help in your search to save money as a avid book reader.
Personal finance geek and explorer of the web who loves to post in-depth blog posts about his findings.