Read books online for free during lockdown

E-book and audiobook platforms are opening up their digital libraries for people

As the Covid-19 pandemic continues, people stuck indoors are looking for new ways to entertain themselves. Reading as an activity can be therapeutic and incredibly comforting. To help bookworms in these stressful times, a few online platforms are opening up their e-book libraries, where one can read and download for free.

Audible

Amazon’s audiobook platform, Audible, recently announced that kids worldwide can instantly stream a collection of stories and titles across six different languages. The stories, categorised by age group, can be streamed through the audible app or website on desktops, laptops, or mobile devices.

Spotify

The audiobooks playlist on Spotify is also free of cost. Currently, the list has ‘The Invisible Man’, ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’, ‘The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn’, ‘Mark Twain’, ‘The Great Gatsby’, ‘Lolita’ and ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, among others. You can choose the premium option if ads interrupt your reading.

Scribd

The American e-book and audiobook subscription service has made all its content, including e-books, audiobooks and magazine articles, available for free for a month. The team also have put together reading recommendation list to help readers find the best of the lot. From thriller-mysteries and romance to contemporary fictions, one can explore handpicked reading materials here.

The Open Library

Started by the Internet Archive, The Open Library allows users to access both public domain and ‘out-of-print’ books on their website. It also has a wide range of genres to choose from such as art, science, religion, history, medicine and plays. Most publications are available as ePub, plain text, and PDF versions. Some titles also offer audio versions.

The Internet Archive

The American digital library already offers free public access to a number of digitised materials, including books, for free consumption. They have now released the National Emergency Library in the wake of the pandemic, which has made 14 lakh e-books available. Here, one can access books and authors that were previously not available for consumption without a membership. The encrypted file of these digital copies, however, will be unusable after two weeks.

Project Gutenberg

With over 60,000 books available for free, Project Gutenberg primarily offers classic literary works. It is also a good resource base if you are a crime or mystery buff as it offers a wide range of works by classic crime writers such as Grant Allen, E W Hornung and Agatha Christie. The reading materials are also available in ePub or Kindle versions.

They also boast of a human-read free audiobooks section with a wide variety of books including Aesop’s Fables (Vol 1 to Vol 12), Sense and Sensibility, and Jane Eyre.

byGosh

byGosh is an online platform that offers free illustrated classic literature, short stories, poems, novels and nonfiction for children. It offers a variety of genres, categorised by age group. The platform also has a number of featured titles per month. All books can be read online as plain text.