10 sites with free EPUBs you can send to your Kindle (or any e-reader)

The best part of owning a Kindle, a Kobo or any other e-reader is that a lot of very good reading costs nothing. Everything published before the late 1920s is public domain in the United States, publishers give away first books to hook you on a series, and thousands of Kindle titles drop to free for a day or two at a time. The hard part is knowing where to look.

This list started as a Reddit thread where readers swapped the free EPUB sites they actually use. I’ve gone through every one, taken screenshots, and organised them by what they’re good for — because “free ebooks” covers three quite different things: public domain libraries, publisher giveaways, and daily deal trackers.

The ten sites at a glance

One thing to know before you start: since 2022 Amazon’s Send to Kindle accepts EPUB directly and no longer takes the old MOBI format, so an EPUB download works on every e-reader on the market. If a site offers a “Kindle” download, take it; if it only offers EPUB, that’s fine too.

Public domain libraries

These are the sites that hold the books themselves. Nothing here is a limited-time offer; the books are free because their copyright has expired, and they’ll still be free next year.

Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg is the original, and at more than 79,000 titles it’s still the biggest. The focus is older works whose U.S. copyright has expired, which in practice means everything from Austen and Dickens through to the early 1930s, in dozens of languages. Every book comes as EPUB, a Kindle file, HTML and plain text, and there’s no account and no tracking of any kind.

The trade-off is presentation. Gutenberg’s editions are volunteer transcriptions, and the typesetting varies from fine to rough. If a book you want exists on the next site, get it there instead.

Standard Ebooks

Standard Ebooks is a volunteer project that takes public domain texts, mostly from Gutenberg, and rebuilds them to a professional standard: consistent typography, curly quotes, proper section breaks, a table of contents, and custom cover art from public domain paintings. The catalogue is far smaller than Gutenberg’s, a few thousand titles, but every one of them reads like a book you paid for.

They also care about e-readers more than anyone else on this list. Each book is offered as a standard EPUB, an AZW3 for Kindle, and a KEPUB for Kobo, and their help pages walk through Send to Kindle step by step. For a classic you actually intend to read cover to cover, start here.

Faded Page

Faded Page is a Canadian volunteer archive of just over 9,000 books, each scanned, OCR’d, proofread and formatted by hand. The catch, and the reason it’s worth knowing about, is that it follows Canadian copyright law, which until 2022 ran fifty years from the author’s death rather than seventy. So you’ll find mid-century authors here that Gutenberg can’t carry: John Steinbeck, C.S. Lewis, Laura Ingalls Wilder.

That also means the site’s own warning applies: check the copyright status in your country before downloading. A book that is public domain in Canada may still be under copyright in the United States or Europe.

Roy Glashan’s Library

Roy Glashan’s Library is the same idea under Australian copyright law, run as a companion to Project Gutenberg Australia. The design is from another era, but the collection is unlike anything else here: whole runs of Nick Carter, Sexton Blake and Phantom Detective serials, a German-language section, and a long list of adventure and science fiction writers nobody else has digitised. Each title comes as HTML or EPUB. The same copyright caveat applies as with Faded Page.

Biblioteca Digital, Fundación Carlos Slim

For readers in Spanish, PruebaT’s Biblioteca Digital offers around 170 hand-picked classics, from Homer and Plato to Kafka and Dostoevsky, in Spanish translation, plus a handful in English. Every title is a direct EPUB or PDF download with no account, and each carries a suggested age, which makes it a good source for younger readers too.

Publisher giveaways

Baen Free Library

Baen, the science fiction and fantasy publisher, has run a Free Library since the earliest days of ebooks. The strategy is deliberate and Baen has said it works: authors are encouraged to put the first book of a series in the library, on the theory that a reader who finishes book one will buy the rest. It’s the same logic as a free sample, applied to entire novels.

The library currently holds 82 titles, including annual collections of free short stories and nonfiction from across their authors. Everything Baen sells is DRM-free and comes in EPUB, Kindle and several other formats. You’ll need a free Baen account to download, but nothing else.

ManyBooks

ManyBooks sits between the two categories. Its 50,000-title catalogue is mostly public domain, the same texts as Gutenberg with a cleaner interface and proper genre browsing, but it also runs a “Free ebooks and deals” section of indie authors giving their books away for exposure. Downloads come as EPUB, Kindle or PDF, and you’ll need a free account to get them. It’s the easiest place on this list to browse when you don’t know what you want.

Daily deal trackers

The last three don’t host books at all. They watch the Kindle, Kobo, Apple and Nook stores for books that have dropped to free, usually for a day or two as part of a promotion, and tell you about it. This is where current bestsellers and new releases turn up. The book goes into your Amazon or Kobo library like any purchase, so there’s no file to move.

eReaderIQ

eReaderIQ tracks the Kindle Store continuously and lists everything that has gone free in the past 24 hours, sortable by popularity or recency and filterable by genre. It also does price-drop alerts: put a book on a watch list and it emails you when the price falls below a threshold, which is a great way to wait out a new release. The site is ad-supported and busy, and most filters need a free account, but it’s the most thorough freebie tracker there is.

Freebooksy

Freebooksy lists books that are free for that day only, across more than twenty genres, with links for Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books and Nook. Sign up, tick the genres you read, and a daily email arrives with that day’s picks. The reader who recommended it in the thread added a warning that doubles as an endorsement: they had to unsubscribe because their to-be-read pile had grown out of control.

The Fussy Librarian

The Fussy Librarian is a smaller, more curated version of the same idea. There are two newsletters: a free-ebooks email that arrives on the days you choose across twenty genres, and a bargain email delivered daily across forty. What sets it apart is content preferences: you can filter out profanity, violence or explicit scenes, which no other tracker here offers. Listings link to the Kindle and Nook stores.

Getting a free EPUB onto your Kindle

Books from the deal trackers deliver themselves, because you “buy” them at $0 and Amazon or Kobo puts them in your library. For a file you’ve downloaded from Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks or Baen, you have three options:

• Send to Kindle. Amazon’s own service accepts EPUB by email, browser upload or its desktop app. Amazon converts the file, so page-flow and font settings work as they would for a bought book.
• USB. Plug the Kindle in and drop the file into its documents folder. This is the only route that skips Amazon’s conversion; Standard Ebooks recommends their AZW3 file for it.
• A one-click uploader. Our free EPUB to Kindle tool takes the file and your Kindle address and sends it, without installing anything.

On a Kobo, a Nook or a Boox reader there’s even less to do: they read EPUB natively, and Kobo readers will take Standard Ebooks’ KEPUB for better page-turn performance.

Free reading that isn’t a book

Every site above is about books, but the same public-domain-and-goodwill economy runs through the open web. Most of the best writing online is free and published through RSS: essays, newsletters, long-form journalism. The reason it rarely reaches an e-reader is purely that nobody packages it up.

That’s what RSS to Kindle does. You pick the blogs, Substacks and news sites you want, and each morning their new posts arrive on your Kindle as a single digest, typeset like a book. Pair it with a couple of the libraries above and you can keep the e-reader full without buying anything at all.