Where to find free e-books

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Looking into the E-reader scene, one of my driving factors in garnering which device would be the best buy was the availability of free E-books from sources other than the proprietary ones. This list is a selection of ones I found and is reassuring that whichever device you choose, most sites seem to offer formats that work with all the major devices out there. Plus the availability of free E-books adds in favor of buying an E-book period.

free-sony-ebooks.com

Clicking on titles takes you to www.smashwords.com but still appears to be connected to the site. Formats available are:

• Kindle (.mobi)
• EPub
• LRF (Sony)
• Palm Doc (PDB)
• PDF
• RTF (Rich Text Format)
• Plain Text (viewable online and download)
• Online Reading (HTML or Javascript)

www.feedbooks.com

At first glance it seems that the only available format is Epub, but the supported devices page provides a few different avenues. It includes a link to a dedicated Kindle page.
Formats available:

• Epub
• Kindle (.mobi)

www.gutenberg.org

Formats Available:

• HTML
• Epub
• Kindle
• PDF
• Plucker
• QiOO Mobile

www.bookyards.com 

Formats available:

PDF

www.archive.org 

Haven't explored this yet so unable to comment on formats or other information. Contains a list of sites that could potentially yield E-books freely. Included among them is gutenberg.org so might be promising.

manybooks.net 

This site seems to have decent quality and range of downloads.

• Formats available:
• ePub (.epub)
• eReader (.pdb)
• Kindle (.azw)
• Mobipocket (.mobi and .prc)
• PDF - regular, custom and large (.pdf)
• Plain text (.txt)
• RTF (.rtf)
• Sony Reader (.lrf)

openlibrary.org

I haven't been able to look into this one yet. First impressions seems to be more of a indexical site than a free resource.

Related articles

• Converting between Kindle, epub, etc. (sebastianmarshall.com)
• Google Editions: a history of ebooks (telegraph.co.uk)
• Best Sources for eBooks | Chamber Four (chamberfour.com)
• Understanding eBook Formats (brighthub.com)

Reasons to get an E-Reader

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Lately, my attention has been focused on E-readers. The reasons I'm pining for one are:

1. I love books, and having lost a small collection of them a few years ago, I'm not hard pinned to invest money building a new one; so having a e-reader makes perfect sense as it would be hard to lose your collection as you can take it with you anywhere you go. 
2. The fact what you can have everything you own with you at all times is a given.
3. I read a bit of technical and reference books and most of the time I need my hands elsewhere and would require 2-3 books at a time. An e-reader cuts down on the hassle and clutter.
4. I tend to read 3-4 leisure books at the same time and couldn't possibly carry all of them with me at all times.
5. Being able to look down and trounce people who relegate e-readers as a fad and how they'll never take place of physical books. (Your opinions don't count you dinosaurs!)

Those are the "Why's" and "I wanna's." When it to comes to the question of selecting one, there are a slew of options. I had been waiting for the 1st and 2nd generation readers to pass as the response times were sluggish when turning pages, not to mention the price.

At present the prices have dropped, with brand name devices running around € 100 to over mid € 200. The only contention being that most of them are locked into their proprietary makers' e-book stores and formats. Some offer common existent formats such as .txt, .pdf etc but their rendering is either slow or lacking, and the much talked about ePub format is currently in the discussion phase. When amalgamated, it will enable an universal format for nearly all publishers and manufacturers thus enabling near similar reproduction on every device and opening up libraries to all users.

I will hopefully be delving into the details of specific e-readers soon enough. Till then hold your noses people.