If you’re a fervent reader and nerd like I am, you’ve probably encountered quite a lot of writing online. However, most of them are either absolute garbage or entirely illegal.

It’s hard to find good, legal reads online – unless you know where to look. There are several sites that offer classic out-of-copyright writing, or publishes new e-books online as promotions.

If you know where to look, you can feast on these completely free Ebooks for all the time you’ve got, and today is the day we’ll show you where to look.

Planet eBook

Planet eBook is a classy site that offers classic literature for free. These books, because they’re out-of-copyright, can be offered to you in an entirely legal fashion.

However, Planet eBook doesn’t just give you any piece of ‘free literature’. Right now, they offer about 60 books to their readers, all of which have been carefully selected. True, you won’t have the buffet of thousands that you’ll find on other sites, but you can be assured that each and every piece of writing on Planet eBook is of outstanding quality.

Furthermore, if you feel like a book is ‘missing’ from it’s collection, you put it up as a suggestion.

All books on Planet eBook can be read on the site, but can also be downloaded as a PDF, both in a 1-page and 2-page version.

ManyBooks

ManyBooks works in the same way as Planet eBook, they offer pieces of classic literature for free that are out-of-copyright. However, where Planet eBook presents a carefully selected array of literature, ManyBooks handles in bulk (as the name truthfully implies).

At the time of writing, there are 24,741 completely free eBooks available and although it might be true that not all of them will read your socks off, I’m sure you can find some good reads in the better part of them. To select a book, you can browse by author, title, category or language, or you can browse through the site’s recommendations.

Not only does the site offer an amazing number of books, it does so in an incredible number of formats. Although you might not be able to read it directly on the site, you can check out one of the mirrors or choose between a dazzling 25 different filetypes to read it on your desktop, mobile, or eBook device.

Classic Reader

Classic Reader takes a conceptual place in between Planet eBook and ManyBooks. It offers noticably more books than Planet eBook (3,629 titles at the time of writing), its material is still more selected (by a 1-man Canadian company) and controlled.

Perhaps the major distinction with the two previously mentioned sites is that there are no eBooks available for download. Alas no PDFs, ZIPs, or anythings — the eBooks are all meant to read online, on the site.

You can browse the author or title list, or filter content out by looking into a specific genre: fiction, non-fiction, young readers, poetry, short stories, drama or classical.

PublicBookshelf

Contrary to the three previously mentioned sites, PublicBookshelf is NOT filled with works of classic literature. Instead, PublicBookshelf relies completely on new, promising authors who publish online as a means of promoting their printed books. As such, you won’t be able to download the books, but will often find an Amazon link to support the author (who – with the books on this site – is often still alive).

PublicBookshelf – focusing entirely on romance novels – is a great site to sample the writing if you’re looking for something fresh, but it’s also a great site if you’re looking for a good read. Check out their top novels for reading directions, or venture off into the depths of the site and discover treasures of writing yourself.

I hope you’ve got 4 fresh bookmarks for completely free ebooks that will be able to satisfy the literacy-vampire that’s inside of you.  If they are not enough, check out where to get more romance e-books, 6 more e-book sites, where and how to read comic e-books, and how to make your own e-books from Wikipedia.

If you know of any other sites or have something to say about the ones discussed above, head for the comments section below.