While it ebbs and flows in tune with what sports season we’re in the middle of and how busy work is keeping me, I like to think that I do a decent bit of reading. (I wanted to go with the phrase “avid reader”, but that felt like a bit much considering I know people who churn through the number of books I read in a year in a single month.) For both 2023 and 2024, I put together posts on how my yearly reading challenge went, though it’s worth mentioning that neither of them were close to my 2021 or knockout 2022 year. Books aren’t the cheapest thing in the world, and when you read a lot, it starts to get a little much to be dropping $12+ per book… and that can be on the low end. As a result, I’m always a fan of leveraging the local library, especially if you’re lucky enough to have awesome ones like I’ve historically had with a great ebook selection. Depending on the type of books you like to read, though, the library may not be the only avenue for free books. Enter Standard Ebooks.
Standard Ebooks is a completely free website that offers up beautifully typeset ebooks for works in the public domain. As it says on their about page:
Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven effort to produce a collection of high quality, carefully formatted, accessible, open source, and free public domain ebooks that meet or exceed the quality of commercially produced ebooks. The text and cover art in our ebooks are already believed to be in the U.S. public domain, and Standard Ebooks dedicates its own work to the public domain, thus releasing the entirety of each ebook file into the public domain. All the ebooks we produce are distributed free of cost and free of U.S. copyright restrictions.
https://standardebooks.org/about
Naturally, you have to like some classics since only titles which are old enough will have made it to the public domain. That being said, there’s a ton of works available at the site, with new ones being added all the time. I’m personally in the habit of seeing what new titles they have once a month or so. This has led me to stumbling across some titles I wasn’t even aware of.
Just like you’d expect from a commercial offering, Standard Ebooks has options for filtering and sorting titles in order to help you find exactly what you’re looking for or to be able to peruse more effectively.
When downloading books they come in a wide array of formats:
- Compatible epub
- azw3
- kepub
- Advanced epub
I personally always just grab the compatible epub and open it up on my iPad. Even better is that Apple books will pull it in without issue and sync it to my other devices. The ebook I’ve been reading on my iPad at home will open to the exact same page on my iPhone if I find myself out and about with some time to kill.
One of my favorite features of Standard Ebooks, though, is that they do an analysis of the book to give an estimate of how difficult it may be to read. Books written a century ago under very different circumstances and for a very different audience can sometimes be a bit of a slog for modern readers. With this analysis, however, you can at least made an informed decision about what your experience may be like right while you’re reading the provided summary, like this one for Andre Norton’s Storm Over Warlock:
While I enjoy reading modern books and still overwhelmingly get my content from my local library, I find that Standard Ebooks is a terrific resource to keep in the back of my mind. When most things I want to read are tied up by other readers at the library, having over a thousand public domain works to choose from can fill any reading gaps quite nicely.