No ARCs or Beta Reading Platforms Necessary
Sick of paying real money for books that make you sob, books that make you remember the dire state of the world we live in, books that make you yearn characters you’ll never meet? In this economy?
Cool, me too. Let’s get some free books, legally, of course.
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1. Use your local resources.
Looking around locally is a great way to get free books.
Search for book swap events and local buy-nothing groups. I like Nextdoor and Facebook (yes, I am really old).
Make sure to keep yourself safe when meeting to exchange free or paid items, though.
Other places you can look for free books, locally:
- Your local library, obviously, if you have a card
- Little free libraries
- Books left over after library sales
- Community centers or other public spaces meant to enrich communities
2. Exhaust every online resource possible for free eBooks.
Ok, so there are a lot of ways to get free eBooks.
I think most people know about Libby, but you might not know my trick for getting the most books for free.
If you have that library card we were just talking about, you can add your card number to Libby and get access to a ton of free books. You will sometimes have to wait for books, which is why I like to keep my holds maxed out.
Leave a comment if you want to know more about how I keep my Libby absolutely stacked.
What you may not know is that you can add multiple libraries to Libby. Then, you can just switch back and forth between libraries to find books.
How does that work? Well, let’s say you live in Pennsylvania. You can have a card from your local library as well as one from The Free Library of Philadelphia. Add them both to Libby. It’ll allow you to do this within the same account.
Ok, where else can you find free eBooks?
- Project Gutenberg
- The WayBack Machine, believe it or not. I once read a book for a book club from the author’s archived website.
- OpenLibrary
- Free state libraries like Power Library
- Barnes and Noble lets you search for free Nook books.
- Sign up for newsletters from sites like Book Bub.
- Amazon has some free books you can get without even signing up for Kindle Unlimited. Look for the classics, or just search for 0.00 (it’ll show you books at that price).
3. Use your credits and rewards.
Maybe this is considered cheating, because you probably paid for something to get a reward that’ll get you a free book.
I’m going to talk about it anyway.
If you’re an Amazon Prime member, you can borrow books through Prime Reading.
On that note, you can also use your Amazon digital rewards. How does it work? If you’re buying something you were going to buy anyway but don’t need it in a rush, Amazon will often ask you if you want no-rush shipping for a digital reward.
I almost always go with this option, and once I have enough saved up, I use it to buy an eBook.
Last month, I used my credits to buy The Wall by Marlen Haushofer and, unfortunately, the supposed Historical fiction The First With of Boston.
Similarly, Google’s Opinion Rewards app will ask you to do surveys after visiting physical store and restaurant locations in exchange for change (literally – I don’t use it, but my husband does, and he gets literal cents for his surveys). You can eventually use that to buy Google eBooks.