Free e-Books for Homeschoolers

I've been wanting a Kindle forever but just couldn't bring myself to spend the money. I asked for it for my last birthday but then pulled the request as I just thought that maybe it was too frivolous. You know -- Want vs. Need.

However, now I'm completely rethinking the whole thing.

As a homeschooler, I use a lot of classic books. A LOT. And most of them can be found for free download on the internet. I have take advantage of some of these free books but not much as I'd like as it isn't easy to read on my computer. Reading on a Kindle (and I imagine other book readers are similar) really is much like reading a regular book. You can even make annotations in the columns and highlight passages. I do love real books. My home is decorated in Early Library but maybe it is time to enter the modern age. At least a wee bit.

Yes, I know there is the public library and I do take great advantage of it. In fact, I have a daughter who works at the library and I often enlist her to do my library grunt work. But there are times when even the classics are hard to get via inter-library loan. (Our small town library didn't even offer inter-library loan until a few months ago!) Or I need a book for an entire semester or I need it quick.

Anyway, with all those free books out there I think the Kindle would pay for itself easily in less than a year. Now, all my geek friends tell me to forget the Kindle and go for an i-Pad but I really, really can't bring myself to spend that kind of money. Cha-ching, cha-ching!!!

So, the whole point of this blog post was to share links to all those free books with you. Let's get to it ...

Baldwin Online Children's Literature Project
Bringing Yesterday's Classics to Today's Children. We're using this currently for our Ancient Greece and Rome books including Famous Men of Greece and Famous Men of Rome.

Christian Classics Ethereal Library
From Calvin College, loaded with lots of Church Fathers and Catholic saints. It even has large selections from Summa Contra Gentiles. I've downloaded Chesterton and others here.

Google Books
In addition to classics, authors have uploaded current books. Also magazines.

Gutenberg Project
THE original producer of free e-books. Over 100,000 books.

Heritage History
Similar Baldwin Project, only dedicated exclusively to children's history books

Internet Archive

Librivox
Free audio books!

Literature Page
The Literature Page is your place to read classic books, plays, stories, poems, essays, and speeches online, brought to you by the creators of The Quotations Page. Our collection currently includes 243 works from 89 authors. We add new titles regularly.

Many Books
All free books in a wide variety of genre. They contain books from Project Gutenberg, and has links to Librivox when available. You can download them already converted to a variety of formats if you don't want to go through Calibre.

Munseys
This site absolutely has things you will not find anywhere else.

TextKit: Resources for Greek and Latin
Our Latin textbooks for this year are from this website.

As with any book, make sure anything you download is acceptable. Even classics contain trash.

I'll put these links up in the sidebar here at the blog so you find them there in the future.

Happy reading!!!