You don’t always have to pay for a good book. There are plenty of ways to find quality, free books for all ages…the best being your local library. But if you have a family full of readaholics, you also don’t always want to continuously have stacks and stacks of print books around the house. Free or not, you can simply run out of room. That is the beauty of an e-reader. It is nearly impossible to run out of room and if you do happen to run out of room, just delete some files. Deleting an ebook you downloaded for free is not as heartbreaking as deleting an ebook you paid for, since you can always go back in the future and redownload it.
Here are ten great websites that offer free ebooks for children. (Plus one temporarily free bonus.)
1. Amazon’s Free Kindle Books for Kids
This link will direct you to the top 100 free Kindle books for kids. Another way to find free Kindle books on specific subjects is to go to the main ebook page and scroll down a little bit until you see the subjects on the left side of the page. Click the subject you are interested in and then sort that list by Price: Low to High.
2. International Children’s Digital Library
The search options for this website are incredible. You can search by age, language, subject, length, awards won, type of character, emotions, and much more. Most of the books are full color.
3. Children’s Books Online
I love this delightful site because you can search by reading level. Most of the books are full color and some include audios.
4. The Baldwin Online Children’s Literature Project
Popular children’s literature, organized into 19 genres, including biographies, history, and science.
5. Librivox
An impressive list of over 1800 audio books recorded and submitted by volunteers
6. Page by Page Books
Classic books arranged by title
7. World Wide School
Search by subject, author, or title
8. Internet Archive: Children’s Library
Browse by title, author, staff recommendations, most downloaded, or cloud tags. Most books are available to download in pdf format or to view online in flipbook.
9. Planet eBook
Classic books arranged by title
10. Classics for Young People
Classic books arranged by author
A bonus #11: Scribd
Scribd is a membership site that charges $8.99 per month for unlimited reading (since writing this post, they have changed their membership terms and there is a limit to how many books you can read per month in certain categories.) I recommend signing up for a two month trial to view what types of books would fit your interests. If you do not have any interest in signing up as a paid member after that, at least you know you’ve received two months to cram as many free books in as you want. Interested in reading more information on how we use Scribd as a homeschool family?
