Free, Legal eBooks at WOWIO

Xander · Post by **Xander** » April 13th, 2007, 3:56 am

I found this site (http://www.wowio.com) where you can get many public domain and copyrighted PDF eBooks for free. Legally. They use sponsors and pre/post book ads to cover the cost of the copyrighted material.

I have to admit that this is partly a ploy to get 10 people to sign up with my email address (alex [at] zamws [dot] com) as the referrer email so I can get an iPod shuffle.

However, this site does have many good books that are nicely formatted. They could be an alternate source to read from when Gutenberg only has the .txt files.

So, if you do choose to register at http://www.wowio.com I would be delighted if you used alex [at] zamws [dot] com as the referrer email address. You will have my undying gratitude

(and some really cool free, legal eBooks).

rootpi · Post by **rootpi** » April 13th, 2007, 10:43 am

This seems like a great site overall, but I'm not sure it's much help for Librivox'ing. Most of their books (as I understand it) are not PD, simply legally free. Some of them are obviously PD (Dickens, Poe, Shakespeare, etc) but they're not marked as such on the site. So one would need to verify this elsewhere in any case... and then make sure that the two versions had identical text. Yes?

-julian

benzion72 · Post by **benzion72** » May 8th, 2007, 1:20 am

This is part of discrimination going on in our world, as much as i will like to register with wowio they have restricted thier service to United state resident alone

12makoto · Post by **12makoto** » May 8th, 2007, 8:29 am

I'm not sure that its really discrimintation, it probably has to do with copyright/public domain laws. Since they use US laws, they probably restrict it to US users to make sure there's no illegal activity they can be accused of. Also, since not all of their books are in the public domain, it also probably has something to do with agreements they have with publishers of the books that are still under copyright.

Sean