With the growing popularity of electronic formats and the advantages that these give when it comes to accessing content, today we have various options to read books for free on our iPad without having to resort to piracy.
Public domain books, collaborative work, popular initiatives... are several of the terms that we will discuss in this article on how to read free books on your iPad that we hope you enjoy.
Download the Amazon Kindle app
In our opinion, the best application to read books for iPad today is the one itself Amazon Kindle. Although it is originally oriented to be able to see books designed for the platform itself, the app also allows us to view other books that we have on our device and among them the ePUB format, which is the most universal of all the existing electronic book formats, as well as with Adobe's typical format, the PDF.
Importing books to Kindle once downloaded is quite easy to do:
- In the Kindle App, access the three horizontal points which is in the upper right.
- Choose Documents and a section called Personal documents
- Choose "add library file”. There you will have to choose where the electronic book you have downloaded is (internal memory, or an app such as Google Drive or Dropbox)
- Once imported, the book will already appear in your section of Personal documents.
And although this article is about how to read free books on an iPad, it may be interesting to talk about a service within this application: Kindle unlimited , which brings the concept of a streaming application such as Netflix or Prime Video to reading: for a monthly subscription, users can access an unlimited number of books in an interesting way.
With Kindle Unlimited, subscribers have the ability to choose between over a million titles available, ranging from bestsellers to independent books and works by emerging authors.
In addition to reading eBooks, Kindle Unlimited also offers the option of access selected audiobooks and digital magazines within its catalogue. This provides a more versatile and flexible reading experience, as well as inclusive of people with visual impairments.
Although it is not free (except trial periods), we consider that for a cost of 9.99 euros per month If you are a voracious reader, you will have access to a huge catalog of books at your disposal for the cost of just one, so it may be an option to consider if the free alternatives already fall short or you cannot find the content that is yours. liking.
Project Gutenberg: the oldest initiative
There are different initiatives in the public domain to be able to access electronic books for free without having to resort to piracy and the most famous of them is Project Gutenberg.
Project Gutenberg is an online initiative that seeks to provide free access to a wide range of public domain eBooks. It was created in 1971 by Michael S. Hart, who began by digitizing classic literary works to make them freely available.
That a book is in the public domain means that the copyright has expired, so there is no “owner” of those rights (although authorship remains). This allows anyone to download, read, share and reuse these books without any legal impediment.
This initiative not only covers e-books of general scope: it also encourages the preservation and digitization of rare texts through a series of volunteers who are in charge of digitizing the works, translating them into different languages and applying the necessary corrections.
The Project Gutenberg website is very easy to use and allows you to download both the most universal ePub format, as well as Amazon's Kindle, which can be compatible to read free books on your iPad.
It does not require registration or having to make any payment and in its catalog there is a whopping more than 70.000 works, so it is highly likely that you will find one that is to your liking.
Manybooks: the solidarity of contemporary authors
Another initiative that offers books in the public domain is Manybooks, which has been working since 2004 in which different contemporary authors have decided voluntarily share your creations with humanity for free.
The platform covers a wide range of genres, such as fiction, realistic, science fiction, mystery, romance, classics or children's literature, among others, with a simple and easy-to-use interface.
ManyBooks also allows users download books in different formats, such as ePub, Kindle, or PDF, and offers customization options such as font, size, and style adjustments to tailor the reading experience to individual preferences.
Another strong point of Manybooks is the user community in which reviews, opinions and recommendations about books are shared, in addition to leaving a space to interact, discuss ideas and discover new works based on the opinion of others.
Without a doubt, it is a great option if what you are looking for is to have a bit of the feeling of being in a library, but with the advantage of having the works digitized.
Librivox: the best option for free audiobooks
If what you are looking for is access to reading but you do not have time to read, one option is audiobooks and for this, Librivox It is the best alternative that exists today for free.
This project is based on the volunteer work of people from all over the world who decide to digitize literary works in the public domain through their voice. Volunteers divide the workload, read their parts aloud, and the recording of the individual chapters is compiled into the complete audiobook.
The Librivox library covers a wide variety of literary genres, including fiction, essays, poetry, drama, classics or children's literature and is available in a multitude of languages, so it can also be an alternative for those who are studying a language and want to have Free resources to improve knowledge of the language.
Another public that has been the great beneficiary of Librivox is the visually impaired people, that they would have no way of accessing quite a few of these non-commercial literary works had it not been for this initiative. Another advantage is that there are developers who have designed a native app for iPad, so you can navigate in Librivox without problems.